Reflecting on One Year of Buzz Free Brews

A declaration of alcohol independence

Enjoying a lunch beer at a Biergarten in Berlin.

It was this week one year ago, when we returned from a three-week trip to Europe, that I dove into nonalcoholic brews headfirst and launched this newsletter. I’ve learned so much since then about my mental health, relationship with alcohol, and most excitingly, about the vast universe of non-alcoholic beverages that I had previously been blind to.

Thank you for being a part of my journey. Thank you for trusting me to share honest reviews about the drinks I try. Thank you for investing your time and attention in reading this newsletter. Thank you for showing up!

As I reflect on this past year and how my relationship with drinking and alcohol has evolved, I am grateful. I feel healthier, better rested, and more attune to my emotional regulation.

This is the story of my journey from regularly consuming alcohol to becoming more mindful about drinking.

We had been drinking regularly even before the trip to Europe. Two to three drinks a night was a common ritual in our household. Perhaps a beer before dinner, followed by some wine to accompany the meal, and the occasional rye whiskey with dessert.

I had gotten used to waking up almost every night, in the middle of the night, not understanding why. This is just how things were, I thought. I am not the type of person that sleeps through the night.

Yeah, right.

It was the alcohol all along that disrupted my sleep, disrupted my dreams, and kept calling me back for more every evening. I’d nurtured a drinking habit for nearly two decades, that grew into a craving for a drink after work, after a hike, or just because the clock had struck 5.

Alcohol is good for me, I thought for a very long time. It was common knowledge that red wine is supposed to be good for your heart and people who drink alcohol tend to be healthier than people who don’t.

Several years earlier, we had come across a study that compared non-drinkers to drinkers that found that people who drank alcohol were healthier and lived longer than those who abstained. I recall that this particular study suggested that even heavy drinkers, who consumed up to six drinks a day, ended up living longer than those who abstained.

How convenient! Let’s make sure to drink every single day.

This wasn’t that study, but for an example, this Times article reported in 2018:

“New research, which was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference, has found that moderate drinking is linked to a longer life. Drinking about two glasses of wine or beer a day was linked to an 18% drop in a person’s risk of early death—an even stronger effect than the life-preserving practice of exercise, according to the researchers.”

We’d cheer with “Zum Wohl,” the German way of saying “To your health” or well-being. We felt good about drinking. It was fun. It was relaxing. And we thought we were drinking from the fountain of youth. What’s not to like?

Cheering with beers at the Snowbird Oktoberfest: “Zum Wohl!”

Now we know that even moderate or light alcohol consumption is worse for your health than not drinking alcohol at all. As reported in the New York Times earlier this year:

“The idea that a low dose of alcohol was heart healthy likely arose from the fact that people who drink small amounts tend to have other healthy habits, such as exercising, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and not smoking. In observational studies, the heart benefits of those behaviors might have been erroneously attributed to alcohol…”

If you want to learn more about alcohol’s effects on the body and mind, I highly recommend this Huberman Lab podcast. It was eye-opening for me to learn just how damaging alcohol is to our DNA (increasing cancer risk), to how our brains operate (embedding habitual and impulsive behavior), to our mental health (causing greater anxiety, when not drinking), and to our gut health (increasing inflammation).

We drank a bit more while on vacation, especially in Europe where alcohol is much less expensive, and there’s novelty in drinking regional brews that have a long history and that are hard to find in the U.S. We might have a beer or two with lunch, or drink on a train ride to pass the time—in addition to our dinner drinking ritual. After three weeks of 4-6 drinks almost daily, my husband and I both agreed that it was time to take a break.

We had agreed on taking one week off drinking and I was disappointed with how hard that felt. Not only did I miss the relaxing effect of alcohol at the end of the day, but I also missed the taste and ritual. Five days into this fateful week, I marched down to the Whole Foods near our home and picked up a selection of non-alcoholic brews they had on the shelf. I was committed to making it through the week without alcohol and I also wanted a beer—and right now!

This is the beginning of Buzz Free Brews.

We made it through that week and instead of celebrating with alcohol, we committed to keeping going on our mindful drinking journey. We adopted a new, simple rule: business sober.

Business sober meant not drinking alcohol on Sundays through Thursday, basically before any evening that preceded a workday. It also meant not drinking if we were going to be out in a social setting that would require us to drive afterward. And rather than binge drink on the weekend, business sober also meant drinking only 2-3 drinks on any given weekend day. The goal was to enjoy an alcoholic beer, wine, or spirit, without getting drunk or feeling the effects the next day.

Something interesting happened because of this experiment. It’s transformed into a new lifestyle. One of not needing alcohol or craving it, but choosing it only on occasion, and being mindful about that choice. I’ve also become much more aware of when alcohol hits my pre-frontal cortex and come to experience that buzz as something undesirable. A signal to stop drinking. Whereas in the past, I would have welcomed that buzz and processed it as something relaxing and fun: a signal to keep going. It has the opposite effect on me now. As in “what’s this weird feeling? Ah yes, that’s the alcohol hitting my brain, and I don’t like it.”

Since then, I’ve drank close to 150 different nonalcoholic beverages. Mostly brews but also some wines and zero-proof cocktails. We continue our rituals of having a brew at the end of the day, after skiing or a hike, and with dinner. But now these drinks are almost always non-alcoholic.

Nonalcoholic brews that taste good have been a godsend. Nonalcoholic drinks replace the celebratory ritual, provide the relaxation trigger, and provide something fun to drink in social settings.

Some suggest that nonalcoholic drinks are a good way to moderate, and a good place to start when you’re just becoming sober-curious or wanting to cut back on alcohol. This seems to suggest that I’ll eventually grow tired of drinking nonalcoholic beverages. But I’ve enjoyed the taste of beer and wine for as long as I can remember, and I’ve also taken solace in the ritual of celebrating an accomplishment with a drink or transitioning from work or exercise mode into rest mode with a tasty beverage in hand.

I can’t say I see myself ever growing tired of that. I could be wrong about this. But until then, I’ll keep crushing refreshing NA brews after exercise, enjoying a decadent zero-proof cocktail before dinner, and pairing my meals with de-alcoholized wines.

Thank you for coming along for the ride!

Drink AF if you’ll be driving. All the flavor, none of the consequences.