food&drink
Feature
Going sober: inside the growing low & non-alcohol boom
Christmas is the time for an extra tipple for most, but increasingly, more of us are turning to non- alcoholic alternatives when we fancy a pint or a glass of wine, even outside of Dry January. Inspired by her own dry spell, Hannah Collins looks at how our relationship to drink, and the marketplace, is changing.
The week I gave up alcohol, I was due to go on a huge pub crawl through Cardiff. The change was due to last 12 weeks while my body ad- justed to new medication for my mental health, and I was determined to get back to normal as soon as possible. Alcohol is a depressant, which doesn’t mix well with pills designed to do the exact opposite – something that was confirmed to me when I experimentally drank a light beer two days into my prescription and quickly took a turn for the worse. Neverthe- less, I had to soldier on.
Strangely, I found myself more concerned with other people noticing I wasn’t drinking than I was about not being able to do it. What would I tell them? What would they say? Should I lie? In the end, I opted to disclose the truth to those closest to me, saying I wanted to avoid any awkward questions on the night. They were sympathetic and supportive, and I was very grateful. One of them even disclosed to me privately their own mental health struggles, and we compared sob stories. Pain shared is pain managed.
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I needn’t have worried: even those not in the know never questioned what was in my glass. Age, of course, factors in here: many of us drive, and some are parents without the luxu- ry of a morning’s hangover to sleep off. But it may also be representative of a cultural shift, in general. This August, a report commissioned by alcohol-free brewer Lucky Saint found that almost one in three trips to the pub – and almost 40% of restaurant visits – are alco- hol-free, while more than half of the adults sur- veyed said they now switch between alcohol and alcohol-free drinks more often to reduce their intake. What might be more surprising to older generations is that this figure is 15% higher for Gen Z.
“There’s a pretty clear trend for more young people to avoid alcohol altogether, and it’s a trend that’s been going on for a decade at least,” Andrew Misell, Director for Wales at Alcohol Change UK told me, though he stressed that this isn’t the case for all young people, who are still just as susceptible to alco- hol-related problems as anyone else. Speaking
as a millennial, if you weren’t siphoning off your parents’ vodka and sending the tallest of your mates into a corner shop to get served, you weren’t living your sixth-form years to the fullest. Today, however, I know at least two teenagers who have almost no interest in drinking whatsoever.
What impact has the pandemic had on drinking habits, then? According to Misell, “Pandemic drinking has had a huge effect on so many lives, with heavy drinkers affected the most, putting them at greater risk of serious alcohol harm. And we know that loneliness, boredom, and anxiety have led to more harmful drinking than ever before.” Given the upward trend, I speculate that perhaps over-indulging during lockdown has led people to swing the other way coming out of it – to ‘detox’ from acquired coping habits. “The picture is mixed,” Misell says. “Research shows that some people, par- ticularly those drinking at lower levels, are drinking less than before lockdown, and some have stopped drinking altogether. But those who were heavier drinkers before lockdown
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