The Pandemic, Drinking, Not Drinking, and This Newsletter
In that order
Welcome to Good Drinks, the newsletter. I’m so glad you’re here.
For those of you who are just meeting me, I'm Julia Bainbridge, writer, former (and hopefully future) podcaster, and author of a book called Good Drinks: Alcohol-Free Recipes for When You're Not Drinking for Whatever Reason. The cookbook—named one of the best of 2020 by the Los Angeles Times, Wired, and Esquire—celebrates innovation and deliciousness in the world of alcohol-free cocktails and other beverages (aka "drinks" lol), and this newsletter will continue that work.
I also cover this beat for publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Food & Wine, among others; you can find those pieces as well as some reporting I’ve done around alcohol use disorder, abstinence, and moderation at juliabainbridge.com. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram at @juliabainbridge, but please don’t try to convince me to join TikTok. (I cannae do it!) To hear what else people are saying about Good Drinks, the book, click here.
Now, allow me to address the title of today’s letter, piece by piece. What follows is relatively dense—Good Drinks won’t always be like this!—and I'm not exactly trying to dazzle you with the writing, but I thought it was important to launch with the big-picture view of things, so we can all get situated within this topic.
The Pandemic: It’s still here, it’s still awful, and we’ll be dealing with its consequences for a while, but, as of yesterday, the number of new cases in the United States had decreased by 15%, the death rate was down by 33%, 12% of the population had been vaccinated, and 22% of Americans had received at least one dose.
Drinking: We were experiencing elevated rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, and loneliness before the pandemic hit, and COVID-19 certainly exacerbated them. A study conducted by the RAND Corporation in September suggested that Americans were drinking 14% more often in response to pandemic-related stress, especially women, whose heavy drinking days increased by a staggering 41% in 2020.
It makes sense that people would try to cope this way, says George F. Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “Alcohol is a great emotional pain reliever,” he told me, followed by a distinction: This is the case when it’s coursing through our systems, not the next morning. We tend to forget about the hangovers, though, and hold onto the relief we felt while drinking.
For those who struggle with addiction, the past year has been an extremely challenging time. Many inpatient treatment centers had to reduce capacity or shut down because of the pandemic, and while most people I’ve spoken with who run virtual support meetings say that participation has noticeably increased, many attendees struggle with the loss of their in-person groups. Humans are better wired for face-to-face contact, and much of how we communicate is non-verbal. (“In many respects,” says neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin, “our brains were developed to deal with life as it was 20,000 years ago.”) TL;DR: Screens make us lonely, and loneliness can amplify the risk of relapse in people with alcohol use disorder (AUD).
Even those who didn’t present as in need of treatment before the pandemic may now meet the criteria for AUD, says Dr. James G. Murphy, a psychology professor and addiction researcher at the University of Memphis. “When we go to work every day during non-pandemic times and don’t have an inordinate amount of stress, it’s fairly easy to keep drinking to Friday nights,” he told me for this piece in the New York Times. “When all of that structure is ripped away—when you’re worried about finances and your kids’ home-schooling and you don’t have to be anywhere in the morning, so no one will see if you’re hungover—alcohol can be way more difficult to manage.”
Not Drinking: In the Before Times (are we still doing that?), things were looking pretty good for alcohol-free drinking. Here’s how I summed it up in a piece for Punch:
Google searches for “non-alcoholic” increased 81 percent from 2018 to 2019… Big Liquor, Big Beer and Big Soda are in on the game, too. Coca-Cola announced its Bar Nøne line of bottled non-alcoholic cocktails in January 2019, while Heineken launched a non-alcoholic beer, 0.0, with $50 million in marketing behind it. Later that year, Diageo purchased a majority share of non-alcoholic spirits brand Seedlip, and made news again in 2020, after making a minority investment in Ritual Zero Proof.
Add to that the alcohol-free bars popping up around the country and the growing list of restaurant owners who agreed that offering alcohol-free cocktails—and putting them on the menu—was not only good business, but also a fun creative challenge. (What to call them, though, was a trickier debate. As my friend Jordana Rothman put it, “Menu nomenclature is its own thicket of awkwardness.” See: Camper English’s Mocktail Thesaurus.) “As a person who’s been writing about drinks for a long time, sometimes it feels like there’s nothing new under the sun,” Maggie Hoffman, senior editor at Epicurious and author of The One-Bottle Cocktail and Batch Cocktails, told me in a piece for Wine Enthusiast. “This is an area, though, where there’s very active improvement. Bartenders are really working hard on it, and the drinks are getting better and better.” Good Drinks relied on that energy. The book couldn’t have been made without it.
Then, the world changed last March. And although momentum in the alcohol-free drinks space was hardly the most pressing concern, there were—and are—questions. Will we lose momentum here? Will the pause in bar life mean moving away from this development?
For Josh Harris, owner of two of San Francisco’s most celebrated cocktail bars, the answer is yes. He says his Mission District hotspot Bon Voyage is closed “indefinitely,” his award-winning Trick Dog is operating as a burger joint called Quik Dog, and any energy he’s got is channeled into moving inventory or staying on top of how much of a cut DoorDash is taking from his food delivery orders. “Generally speaking, we've seen bars and restaurants stripped down to what is essential,” says Harris. “Developing a new nonalcoholic cocktail recipe is something that falls into the recreational category.”
Derek Brown says that alcohol-free cocktails sold well at his Columbia Room in Washington, D.C., “all things considered.” In October 2019, nonalcoholic cocktails made up for 0.06% of the Columbia Room’s total sales. By January 2020, it was 1.61%. This January, that number increased to 3.74%, and Brown expects it to rise.
Overall, though, “bartenders have been more concerned with getting and keeping jobs than creating and following new trends,” he says, adding that one source of revenue has been education. In the past six months, Brown has taught 15 virtual cocktail classes, two of which were strictly focused on alcohol-free and four more of which involved at least one nonalcoholic option. Geared towards home bartenders, not professionals, “one could say that it was a return to fundamentals.” Jermaine Whitehead, a drinks expert based in Seattle, agrees that virtual events have been important. He started consulting with DRY Soda Co. in 2019, and that work picked up speed during the pandemic.
Han Suk Cho, who I think of as the nonalcoholic drinks whisperer of California (she has developed truly exquisite beverages for SingleThread, Dialogue, and more), started bottling a small selection of her concoctions at home and delivering them within Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. Called Zero Proof, the project since has been going well. How well? "Let's just say, if I really wanted to, I could quit my day job," Cho says. (Don’t worry, n/naka fans! She doesn’t want to.)
Piper Kristensen is the beverage director at Brooklyn’s Oxalis restaurant, which will reopen on March 24. “The energy and creativity I got from the staff during brainstorming for the non-alc side of the new menu is not something I saw last year,” he says, adding that his team has been inspired by the new products on the market. Alcohol-free has been part of Oxalis’ beverage program since it first opened in 2019, but Kristensen says that, at that time, the recipes required “a huge amount of R&D.” But Ghia, an aperitif, “has given us an avenue to make a good slightly bitter drink that was previously unavailable in non-alc form,” says Kristensen. “I was never able to make the right base myself; I didn’t have the patience to work with wormwood.”
Speaking of Ghia, which launched during the pandemic, it was named Best New Drink of the Year by Esquire. Kevin Pike, a small wine importer and distributor in New York, told Eric Asimov that nonalcoholic wine is the fastest growing category in his portfolio right now, "up 1,000 percent and growing every day.” Non-alcoholic craft beer company Athletic Brewing produced almost 40,000 barrels in 2020. To put that into perspective, according to the Brewers Association, 95% of all breweries in the country produce less than 10,000 barrels annually. And, interestingly enough, Athletic owner Bill Shufelt told me that, according to Nielsen data collected from grocery store checkout scanners, 77% of nonalcoholic beer drinkers also bought alcoholic drinks. “The word ‘sober’ feels outdated,” he says. “Almost everyone goes back and forth across that line.”
Some consumers driving these sales are sober, though. They’re choosing to be. Last year saw people adopting “a sort of preemptive sobriety,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Drexler, giving up alcohol before it had the opportunity to become a problem. Others told me that they had always wondered if they drank too much, and quarantine became an opportune time to explore sobriety. My friend Ruby Warrington, author of Sober Curious (and host of the Sober Curious podcast, on which I was a guest!), says her Sober Curious Facebook group has tripled during the pandemic.
I’m reminded of Eve Turow-Paul’s book Hungry, in which she shows how feeling loss of control impacts our eating habits. Our desire for safety and regaining that control shows up in efforts to optimize health and wellbeing. Losing your grip? Buy a fitness tracker, remove gluten (or, in this case, alcohol) from your diet, and feel like your life is in order.
So, in some ways, the pandemic helped usher forward this movement. Despite what it may seem, though, “the evolution of our drinking habits has been taking shape for a little while now,” writes Mark Byrne in GQ. Read this piece for his assessment.
Nor is alcohol-free social drinking a new phenomenon, by the way. See: the temperance movement and prohibition; mid-20th-century guides to being a good hostess; and the “mocktail” parties and competitions of the 1980s, created and highlighted in the media as a response to what was being called an epidemic of drunk driving at the time. But, as Susan Cheever writes in Drinking in America, "our national character is inextricable from our drinking history." Her brief tour of that history in the book's introduction:
"Every century, our drinking pendulum—the radical change in our relationship to alcohol—swings. In the 1820s we were the drunkest country in the world. By 1930 we had outlawed drinking entirely, with disastrous results. The swings accelerated after prohibition—in the 1950s and 60s we were again awash in alcohol. Although in the twenty-first century there are more laws and more stringent social controls on drinking than there have ever been in our history, we are drinking enough to make alcoholism a significant health problem.”
This is still true, and while this Sober Curious, New Moderation, whatever-we-want-to-call-it movement is growing, it’s not exactly mainstream, and while I do believe that the stigma around alcohol use disorder is lessening little by little, we’re not totally there yet. What feels certain is something that Elva Ramirez crystallizes in the introduction to her own book of alcohol-free recipes, out next month (pre-order here!). “Whereas temperance-era churches and social organizations sought to mandate how entire communities should or should not drink,” Ramirez writes, “the impetus behind the neo-moderation movement is coming from individuals themselves.”
This Newsletter: When I filed the manuscript for Good Drinks, the book, Seedlip was the only accessible alcohol-free spirit on the market. Boy, have things changed. There are so many new products to play with, and paying subscribers will receive reviews and recipes once a month.
The free portion of this newsletter will be more about alcohol-free drinking culture, trends, and, sometimes, sobriety. Maybe a little provocation, too. Sometimes these monthly letters may come in the form of essays, sometimes I'll conduct Q&As, and sometimes I’ll send you a bunch of thoughts and links and quotes that, like a loose braid, start holding some kind of shape somewhere around the middle. Sometimes I’ll publish more than once a month, just because I want to. Case in point: Tomorrow, I’ll be sharing a chat with GQ culture writer Gabriella Paiella.
So, see you Friday. Until then, to borrow the sign-off from my podcast-that-was, The Lonely Hour: Enjoy yourself. (And watch Rina Sawayama's recent airtight performance of "XS.")
Since announcing Good Drinks, things with Substack have gotten...complicated. As Adweek's Mark Stenberg put it, "the program strains its claim to editorial impartiality." I'm aware and evaluating the situation.