A Dry Year

How to change your relationship with alcohol in only 365 days.

It’s easier to abstain than to consume in moderation. Once you break the seal, it’s all over. At least, that was my hypothesis. So, I decided that for 2024, I wouldn’t drink alcohol at all. Some do Dry January; I decided to do a whole dry year. What I learned surprised me, and it turned out to be a good year to do it.

Drying out

We finished off New Year’s Eve with no beer in the house. I had a few that evening, nothing special. Just a quiet New Year at home with the family. I woke up tired but not hungover, and I’ve never been one who needs “hair of the dog.” We went out exploring Nevada. It’s not uncommon for us to enjoy a beer over lunch when we’re out, and our friends had brought some to share. I, of course, declined. Most people fail in their New Year’s resolutions, but only after the first 19 days. I was good for at least one day. No problem.

But I had packed my go-to La Croix seltzers. The famously low-flavor carbonated canned drinks that are popular with hipsters. Well, a lot of us got hooked on them during the pandemic when we noticed ourselves consuming more beer with all that time at home. Maybe that was just me. Either way, I was good. But I had another ace up my sleeve.

Fizzy Water ( “Pumblemoose” is our eggcorn, arising from my son’s mispronunciation of my initial favorite flavor, Pamplemousse.) satisfies most of the cravings of a regular beer.

Three ways fizzy water is as good as beer:

1) It’s in a can. A can has a specific tactile, auditory and sensory feel that most of us are familiar with going way back into childhod. Opening a can is something like packing cigarettes; everyone does it a little differently from each other but the same way each time. The cans are the same size and shape as beer cans; they fit in the same cozy or cup holder, and nobody can tell from across a room that you’re holding fizzy water and not a beer, especially given the bright colors and designs that craft beer cans are printed in.

2) It’s cold and fizzy. Beer and soda are things for which people generate strong cravings, and both commonly come in and are consumed from cans. The sensation of the cold, fizzy liquid hitting the back of my throat turned out to be easily replicated with fizzy water.

3) It’s not sweet. The main difference between soda and beer is that beer is not sweet, at least on the level of soda. Fizzy water is not sweet at all, so the mouthfeel and sensations outlined above are not well replicated for me with soda. Plus, not being sweet, fizzy water doesn’t make you feel full or spike your blood sugar or any of the downsides of soda. (Yes, I’m almost 50…)

So, for the first 3 years of the decade, I was happy to cut my beer consumption with fizzy water consumption. Shifting a bit of the load from high alcohol content craft beers and IPAs over to the fruity but “dry” seltzers. I’m a La Croix guy, like someone might be a Ranier guy or a Miller High-Life guy. I’m not saying it’s better; it’s just my preference. But along the way, we got another option.

Non-Alcoholic Beer

NA Beer, as I think people are starting to call it, is becoming a huge business as Americans, maybe millennials, and certainly Gen Xers, are just looking around at my cohort and shifting their social beverage target away from drinks with alcohol. So, I added that to my palette of refreshing canned beverages.

NA Beer has one extra advantage over fizzy water since it has the can, the cold fizz, and the lack of sweetener.

4) It tastes like beer. It’s the viscosity of beer, the feel on the tongue of beer, and the complex carbohydrate mouthfeel of beer.

5) It smells like beer. Let’s call this a bonus. Smell and taste are pretty linked, but I think it deserves its own advantage.

The combination of the taste and scent signals really lets NA beer, unlike my Pumblemoose, have the calming effect that I used to seek from regular beer. Say my favorite is a hazy IPA; I know that IPAs are kind of a caricature of the middle-aged beer snob, but that’s what I like. If I crack open an Athletic Brewing Co. Hazy IPA and take a cold, long drink, the feel of the fizzy liquid on the back of my throat, the scent in my nose as it’s going down, and the taste on my tongue provides nearly an identical sensory experience as drinking a Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing.

Now, of course, a Hazy IPA is nearly 7% alcohol, and that much alcohol has a big effect on taste, aroma, and mouthfeel, but honestly, once you get used to the NA version, the alcohol element fades into the background, and you come to enjoy the NA version nearly as much. At least I did; I’d say it’s 99.9% of what I need from an actual beer, so close to a facsimile that I went a whole year drinking NA Beer and didn’t have too hard a time craving real beer; at least after January.

Once The Craving Fades

For most of the last decade, I had been a moderate beer consumer, settling down from my pre-parenthood days, where I might have been drinking a bit more. The CDC recommends two drinks or fewer per day for men and one or fewer for women. Now, I never went over that on average. But there were weeks when I hit that average by drinking more than two per day on the weekend and having at least one per day on weekdays.

By mid-February of my dry year, I was buying less NA Beer and consuming less of it per day and per week. I did not keep a record, so you’ll have to go with my anecdotal log. The other thing that happened was that I would not replace the NA beer in the fridge when I ran out. I would buy Athletic by the 12-pack or sometimes other brands like Sierra Nevada Trail Pass, which is a reasonably good clone of Sierra Nevada IPA. But when the supply ran out, I switched to the much cheaper and much lower-calorie La Croix and rode that wave for a week or so.

When I did venture out for more beer, I’d be less likely to buy another twelve pack, simply because I had conditioned myself all those years to see the primary value in the beer in its alcohol content rather than its taste or quality. So my gut reaction was to say, It’s not worth it, and just get the Pumblemoose instead, which is good for me, bad for Athletic Brewing.

How my body changed

I’ve been reading recently that a lot of things can change in your body when you give up alcohol, even for just a dry January. And the heaviest drinkers can notice bigger changes in more of these areas. They include:

Improved Sleep
Better hydration
Withdrawl
Higher energy
Weight loss
Better mood and mental health

The only one of these things I really noticed was improved sleep. This one is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I stopped drinking coffee late in the day and tried to limit my sugar intake late in the day. You can also improve your sleep just by not drinking within 6 hours of going to bed. However, this is a tall order given that social alcohol consumption is an evening and late-night pastime and the taboos against daytime drinking.

But I didn’t lose 15 pounds, see the years melt off my brain like fog clearing from the bay, or find my soul bounding about brimming with vitality as a result of the lack of alcohol in my system. I felt more or less the same.

I have to admit I was hoping in the not-so-back of my mind that cutting alcohol would improve hair growth, but alas, no such luck. What do I blame for this mediocre result? I guess I wasn’t drinking enough for it to matter as much as I’d hoped. That’s an outcome that feels jointly vindicating and disappointing.

It did get better

Things did get better, though. Alcohol is a coping tool that people use to get through immediate difficulties. I definitely used it for that. But also to dull the edge of frustrations and setbacks, to chill when I was otherwise unable to relax and to not think when thinking was too hard.

Without alcohol, I fell back on other, hopefully, more healthy coping strategies like working out to deal with frustration. I have a home gym leftover from the pandemic when I didn’t feel like working out in a mask, so that’s easy enough. I used Apple Fitness+ and a couple of YouTube fitness programs, as well as independent strength training to focus on fitness.

Am I a ripped, toned model of a man? Sadly, no.

Without alcohol to dull the droning BS in my mind, I leaned into vampire walks. In the cold, dark winter months, it’s hard to get out and exercise in the daylight, so I just decided to walk at night. I put in a podcast or audiobook and head out into the night, walking at a fast pace that keeps my heart under 120 BPM and pounds out 4-mile sojourns in the night. I get home tired and ready for a hot shower and fall asleep.

It could have been bad

You never know what is going to come up that will trigger unhealthy coping mechanisms. Halfway through the year, my mother passed away quite suddenly in a very traumatic episode that left us reeling. I was able to get through it without turning to alcohol to cope. In a time of loss and sadness, the idea of losing this achievement, which I was halfway to accomplishing, was terrifying.

I don’t want to overplay this hand, but I can’t imagine a healthy way I could have engaged with alcohol during that time, and the long tail of dealing with this loss, and the planning and leg work and ongoing recovery that follows. It was hard, it is hard, but alcohol would have made it harder.

And so I’m lucky that I stumbled upon this decision when I did, and I was able to stick with it as long as I did. In the end, I made it all the way through the year without drinking save one errant sip of what I thought was an Athletic Big Wave IPA but was actually a regular beer in a similar can. But I don’t call that a failure.

Two days into 2025, I was at Mt. Rose skiing with friends and enjoyed my first regular beer in 367 days. It was great. I enjoyed it. I didn’t hear bells, I didn’t see the savior in the foam, I didn’t fall back into some vice-addled spiral of despair, I had one beer, and we went back out on the slopes and enjoyed the rest of the day.

The Rules

It’s good to get a reset. A do-over. Stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools. But unless you set some guardrails, you’ll end up back where you started. So here are my rules for alcohol for 2025:

No drinking alone.
No drinking at home unless we have guests.
One drink per session.
Beer only.
No hard alcohol or wine (I don’t really like these, so it isn’t a sacrifice.)
Wine or champagne with D only.
Mixed drinks with Mike H only

That’s it. That cuts out the guesswork, the emotional scope creep that leads to excess, and the idea that a lone beer in the fridge is lonely, so I might as well even it out. D and I sometimes have champagne together, so that’s why I will do that with her on occasion. My friend, The Other Mike H, loves to geek out on mixed drinks, and he’s the only friend I have who cares about that stuff. It makes him happy to do it, and I really enjoy that.

Otherwise, it’s going to be a wet year. A moderately wet year. A damp year. It is a year where friends and good times are cake, and the consumption of mild poison is just a little bit of icing.

Cheers to 2025.

-Mike

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