Dry January

John deBary's here and we're talking about it!

Two years in, and this is the first time I’m really talking Dry January. Let’s get into it.

If you’re a drinks person, which I imagine you are, since you’re here, John deBary needs no introduction—but I’ll give one anyway:

John deBary is a bar expert with over a decade of experience in New York City hospitality. He's the author of two cocktail books, Drink What You Want: The Subjective Guide to Making Objectively Delicious Cocktails and the forthcoming Saved by the Bellini (& Other ‘90s-Inspired Cocktails); a freelance journalist; and Food52’s first Resident Drink Expert. He's also a co-founder and board president of Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting structural solutions to quality-of-life crisis facing restaurant workers, and the creator of alcohol-free apéritif Proteau, which he recently put to bed. (Fingers crossed John puts out another product in the near future. The man has taste!) Subscribe to his newsletter here. (Oh, and John is also a judge for the L.A. Spirits Awards and was named one of Wine Enthusiast’s 40 under 40 in 2020. Toot toot beep beep!)

I absolutely adore John Thee deBary, who adds so much to my life, including the (edited and condensed) conversation below. Note: If it's not clear, I'm asking questions in bold, and John is answering them in the regular-weighted font.

We're always discussing this topic, you and I, but I think a good way to start this conversation for the newsletter is through the lens of content. I’ve been asked to write pieces about Dry January, but the angle often feels… It’s an SEO play. It’s the cobbling together of some words, ultimately in service of a keyword-heavy headline that will win traffic. That's not an irregular practice in the media today, but when it comes to alcohol and giving advice, it feels especially icky.

It's a tricky subject because there's this casual commercialization of Dry January. On balance, I think it’s good considering how much marketing effort goes into attaching drinking to various life events: the fourth of July, the winter holidays, weddings, etc. It's nice to have at least one period of the year dedicated towards finding alternatives to that and seeing what your life could be like [without alcohol]. But then, it can cross a line into a clinical realm, coming to people for whom the concept of Dry January might be lifesaving.

Also, it’s not a new phenomenon, but I did find the rapidity at which Dry January was commercialized to be striking. I mean, I'm talking as someone who was part of that, but I feel like it went from being niche to being everywhere very quickly.

Are you saying that Dry January accelerated the monetization of…well, capitalizing on problem drinking?

Not the monetization of problem drinking, but the monetization of the concept of abstinence and the renouncing of drinking alcohol for either a limited or indefinite period of time. 

It depends on who your audience is, right? If you don't have a problem with drinking alcohol and Dry January is a fun willpower challenge or a nice little break, then sure, buy a couple cute nonalcoholic cocktail books, have an accountability buddy, and take these other measures to ensure your compliance with your stated goal of not drinking alcohol for 31 days. That’s very different for someone who will be harmed if they don't stop drinking. Recreational abstinence from alcohol is different from a medical intervention. The preponderance of pieces these days feel more like they treat abstinence or renunciation as a cute, fun thing to do, as an excuse to buy something, rather than as something potentially lifesaving.

I guess I’ve been guilty of something close to this. Because alcohol use disorder is diagnosed on a spectrum from mild to moderate to severe, the one piece I did report, offering readers advice on how to renegotiate their relationships with alcohol, was meant to speak to those who cross that threshold as well as those beneath it, i.e. those who fall somewhere on the extension of the mild end of the spectrum, so to say. But your point is taken, for sure.  

Also, I don’t see a lot of pieces asking, “What does it mean to you if you don't do Dry January? You say you're going to, but you last two weeks. Is that because you didn't buy the right nonalcoholic tequila or does it mean that you should examine some deeper things within yourself?” I don't think I'm seeing that in the popular outlining of how to do Dry January. Instead, it’s about the things you need to buy in order to be successful.

I should point out that, through writing that piece, I realized that I don’t want to endeavor to do something similar again! Going back to the rapidity thing, I’m curious to hear more about your assessment. I think it was the organization Alcohol Change UK that officially created Dry January?

I did a little bit of digging last year for a Food52 piece and found that it was actually a World War II-era practice from Finland meant to conserve alcohol and encourage wellbeing after the war. So, it's to fortify the populace against the vulnerabilities that are brought upon by excessive alcohol use. So, started in the forties.

But it didn't really take off until 2013. Especially in the past four years, it's gone from being ... I think it's in line with the investment and marketing dollars being put towards all of these brands right now. Five years ago we had a handful of nonalcoholic brands, but now there are tons of brands with tons of money and it's just everywhere. PR people are pitching daily. And so it's just the amount of investment, the literal number of brands in the marketplace; it's just correlated with that.

I wonder if it also has something to do with the way people were drinking through COVID…

COVID drinking was big for a lot of people because there wasn't enough to do and it was a pretty scary time, so there's that. I think it happened before COVID started, but definitely it's been accelerated by the idea of wellness and the body as the site and the manifestation of your consumption and lifestyle practices. That’s all become more of a focus because people get long COVID and they can't drink, or people don't want to get COVID, so they do things to be healthy, including avoiding or reducing alcohol. So, yeah, there's a direct effect of the experience of living through a pandemic and the secondary effect of people being more aware of their own mortality and vulnerability. 

I'm seeing claims that more people than ever are opting for Dry January this year, but I can't really find compelling data to back it up. There are numbers in the UK—Alcohol Change UK, the organization that really took off with Dry January, gathers data around it—and food and drink research firm CGA published some survey-based data last year, but I haven’t seen any strong projections for this year yet. Have you? 

No.

Something else you pointed out is that a number of these stories seem to be premised on the idea that you'll give up before Dry January is over.

This is not something I have hard data on, but it seems like a lot of these pieces focus on what you need to buy in order to get through Dry January. What about an examination of the reasons why you drink? That's not sexy, I guess. You can't have an affiliate link for introspection. So, it's harder to write and to place a piece that's more reflective of behavior instead of consumption.

How did you navigate all of this with Proteau?

Looking at my MailChimp right now, I see that I sent a newsletter with a 21% off gift code in January of last year, but it never mentioned Dry January. It said, “Happy New Year! Here's 21% off.”

I never marketed anything towards people who are pursuing sobriety or avoiding alcohol. It was always an affirmative proposition: This is something that is delicious and you should drink it, whether or not you're a drinker. Because, to me, “here’s what to drink when you don’t drink” seems like an unsustainable marketing angle. “Here's the replacement. Here's the thing to remind you of the thing that you are giving up for whatever reason.” That something should be chosen because it’s here, not because you really want it… That just didn't seem to be very interesting or compelling to me.

At the same time, there are plenty of people for whom these products are triggering. A lot of people can have nonalcoholic beer in the house, sure, but a lot of people can't. My worst nightmare was hearing someone tell me, “I got your product and it was so good and it made me feel like I was okay to drink again and I relapsed.” That would be devastating. So, I was never going to be standing outside an AA meeting with a sample table.

When I had a social media manager, I told them to ban “sober” and other related hashtags. Proteau was not a sobriety tool. A lot of brands market themselves that way, and I think that's irresponsible.

Did you see The Cut’s piece by Ana Marie Cox, who has been writing a column on sobriety for the past year or so (and who has, I believe, been sober for just over a decade)? It was called "Hear Me Out: Don’t Get Sober on January 1." She basically said that January 1 is the worst day to get sober because special dates like that—like birthdays, anniversaries, starts to the month or year—"are usually not today. They are usually not right now. Those of us who struggle to control our drinking pick a special date to dry out not because we want to stop drinking but because we don’t want to." 

That's good. But again, who is this for? If you're doing Dry January recreationally, then this isn't really a piece for you. I mean, in some cases, maybe you don't know [if you have a problem with drinking] until you try [abstinence and don’t succeed], but the piece is for people who have legit substance use disorders. For some of them, I’m sure it’s good advice.

This is the other side, the opposite of these pieces that are just product guides. This is, “Don't buy a bottle of nonalcoholic rum. Do some real work on yourself.”

I'll just share with you Holly Whitaker's response to that piece:

holly

A post shared by Holly Whitaker | she/her/hers (@holly)

Yeah. That's probably the core of why the Dry January is thorny because there's so much in there. It’s not like meat-free Mondays or abstaining from sugar for a month. These sorts of things are similar, but they don't have all the deep baggage that alcohol does.

You mentioned that you were audibly exasperated about Dry January on the Taste podcast. Was there any reason for that exasperation beyond what we've already discussed?

No, I think it's very similar. It just feels obligatory, as someone who's a content creator in the attention economy in which everything you do is monetized: post Dry January content, increase following, etc. It feels tedious and rote. And Matt [Rodbard, editor in chief and founder of Taste,] said he hasn't been drinking for years, so I think for people like that, who are dry in life, Dry January can feel a little silly.

I get that. You know this already, but I am pro-Dry January for some of the same reasons as Holly is: If the interest in it is increasing, great. It lowers the barrier to entry into reflecting on one's relationship to alcohol. Plus, experts say that not drinking for a month or a period of time is the best way to evaluate your alcohol use. I believe you agree, right?

Yes, plus consider the fact that, even five years ago, if you walked into a bar or restaurant and you asked for a nonalcoholic drink, you might get a funny look. The people you were sitting with were like, “Are you okay? Are you pregnant?” And the whole bullshit thing where it's bad luck to toast with water? Who the fuck determined that? Why is that something that people say with a straight face? If Dry January played a part in disentangling that from our minds, then I think that that's definitely, on balance, extremely good. And now, if you go to a restaurant or a bar and there isn't at least one decent nonalcoholic option, it’s a bit strange. 

Even for people who don't cross the threshold for alcohol use disorder, the benefits of taking a month off from drinking can have lasting positive effects. The Washington Post summed up some recent studies about this nicely: People continued to avoid or better moderate their drinking after having participated in Dry January because they experienced  saving money, sleeping better, losing weight, and having more energy and a better ability to concentrate. In another study, and I'm reading here,

"a team of researchers in London and the United States recruited a group of 94 healthy men and women who were willing to give up alcohol for one month. They compared them to a similar control group of 47 people who continued drinking. Both groups consisted of people who were moderate to heavy drinkers, drinking on average about 2.5 drinks a day.

The researchers found that the people who gave up alcohol for one month had significant improvements in their metabolic health, despite making little or no changes to their diets, smoking or exercise levels. On average they lost about four and a half pounds, their blood pressure dropped, and they had a “dramatic” reduction in their levels of insulin resistance, a marker for Type 2 diabetes risk. They also experienced sharp reductions in cancer-related growth factors — a particularly important finding, the researchers noted, because even low levels of alcohol consumption can increase the risk of many cancers. None of these improvements were seen in the control group.

The researchers followed up with the study participants six to eight months later to see how they were doing. The group that was abstinent for one month had maintained a “significant reduction” in their alcohol consumption, while the control group did not."

Pretty great.

So, are we saying that we wish Dry January didn’t have to exist, that we wish our culture was different, but we’re glad that it does—for now?

I don't think it's something that needs to go away. I think it's good as a normalization of abstinence. Even the fact that we're having this conversation is pretty significant; a nuanced meditation on Dry January wouldn’t have been a thought five years ago. So, it would be nice if it never had to exist in the first place, I guess, but alcohol has been such a companion to humanity for so long that it's just not even really worth fantasizing about.

That's fair.

For me, the pop commercialization of it and the trivialization of it can be uncomfortable because there are people out there for whom this isn't just something fun to do. Having a little adventure into abstinence is good for anyone, but how much space is being given to various aspects of it? 

And how clear are those delineations? 

I wish there were more pieces like Anna Marie Cox's. Say about it what you will, but these kinds of grounding pieces are good to have. 

What happens if you fail Dry January? What does that mean for you? Where are the non-commercializable lifestyle practices to put in place for people who struggle with Dry January, or for people who want to keep Dry January going? 

It's notable that, for many people with substance use disorders, relapse prevention is key. Everyone's very good at avoiding alcohol when they're hungover and ragged and they've just spent a month partying in December, but what happens in October when you're like, "You know what? It wasn't so bad. I'm going to go back to it." How do you keep sobriety going—and not just through purchases?

Two days ago I shared some new (and old) bottles of bubbly I’m into.

That I’m continuing this list without fixing the end-of-sentence preposition above shows real growth. I’m losing my grip—in a good way, I think.

I was also featured or quoted in:

• The Huffington Post, today

• The Guardian, yesterday

Cheers!