Farewell (for Now)

The Good Drinks newsletter is dead. Long live Good Drinks!

Well, folks, I told you it was coming: This is the last-ever edition of Good Drinks.

I started this newsletter as a way to take the time I spent seeking out the best alcohol-free beverage products on the market and speaking with makers, bartenders, and beverage writers all over the world and turn it into something useful for you. Although the most popular editions have been the most recent ones and the subscribership continues to grow, I’ve decided to turn my attention towards other things. In the past two weeks, I finished graduate school, got married (oop!), and started a full-time job as a psychotherapist at a private practice called Rose Hill. It’s my belief, especially considering the way I’m meant to work, that it doesn’t serve my patients to have this kind of access to me, and it also doesn’t serve them for me to be pulled in so many different directions that I don’t devote proper time to my case conceptualizations. Basically, for me to be a good therapist, it requires more fully letting go of my former profession so that I can focus. This is especially true because I’ve only just begun in this field, and psychoanalytic theory is so challenging to understand, let alone put into practice. It’s is going to take everything I’ve got.

Good Drinks the book, though, lives on—and I’m so very close to receiving royalty checks. This is a big deal for what was, at the time it launched in October 2020, a super-niche drinks book. It ended up outperforming the expectations of my publisher, Ten Speed Press, and I’m sure no one imagined it would earn out its advance, but I’m almost there. So, please, tell your people about it! And D.C., come participate in a conversation between me and my friend Daniela Galarza at Bold Fork Books on May 24. This will be the last public-facing, drinks-related event I’ll be doing for quite some time.

I love how Mike Ley’s brain works. (You can see why in this edition.) The designer at Apple, who was also the creative force behind the visuals for my book, created one original pattern for each month of this newsletter's life. I tried putting all of that work in one place, but it goes beyond Substack’s length limits, so please enjoy the first set here:

About This Newsletter's Art

Then, enjoy taking in the second set below.

Thank you, Mike!

And thanks to all of you who have followed along, commented, sent direct messages, or emailed me these past couple years. It’s been a pleasure.