I stopped drinking alcohol in June 2023, a decision that was long overdue and has since improved my life unconditionally—congratulations to me! And yet stopping drinking did in no way quench my urge to drink, because that's not how addiction works. In fact, I felt thirstier than ever and fiending for something to glug at a bar or a house party and pretend I was still a younger, more foolish version of myself. So I turned to mocktails, because that's what was increasingly advertised on the menus and on the subways and in a slew of articles and books. People were paying $14 for a Phony Negroni® at the shadowy pizza place down the street, so why shouldn't I?
My first foray in mocktails happened in 2016, during a six-month dry spell when I was on a course of the acne drug Accutane. The dive bars I went to with friends didn't yet have a trendy fleet of non-alcoholic drinks, and I was mostly too scared to make a bartender feel put upon by asking for an off-the-menu mocktail. (I did try this once in an attempt to flirt with the bartender and promptly received a Shirley Temple, which I didn't not enjoy but also made me feel like a child with no game.) Sodas were a no-go because of the caffeine, and plain seltzer made me wonder if bubbles were worth paying up to $3 for water. After some trial and error, I settled on a DIY mocktail I called "spicy drink": I'd order seltzer with pineapple juice and douse it with hot sauce that I carried in my bag. The resulting concoction was sweet and sizzly, vaguely reminiscent of some of my favorite tequila drinks, although I would never serve it to anyone else. I made it work with spicy drink because I knew in a few months I'd be back in the saddle, reunited with my beloved tequila soda.
But this time, things were different. Quitting drinking meant there was no spirituous grail waiting for me beyond the horizon. And I wanted this life change to feel celebratory, not like punishment, and so this is how I found myself in that shadowy pizza place, shelling out 14 of my hard-won American dollars for one cup of Phony Negroni® as my friends drank big, intriguing glasses of wine. It tasted like a negroni, almost. It was bitter and tart and smoky, if a little sweeter than my memory of a real negroni. I sipped my uncanny drink and felt pleased; surely sobriety would be easier with such a dupe at my side.
And then I got the bill, and I realized I simply did not lead the kind of lifestyle that encouraged spending $14 on a drink at dinner, no matter how herby and aromatic. For a few months, I'd order whatever special mocktail was on the menu, which was occasionally delightful: the salted cranberry, bay leaf, and thyme shrub at Vinegar Hill House and a mango jalapeño concoction drizzled over a tower of pebble ice at the Lobster Pot. But more often than not, my mocktail arrived in a novelty glass and tasted just like normal lemonade, occasionally tinted with butterfly pea, presumably to justify the sticker price. Don't get me wrong—lemonade is nice! But if I'm paying $12 for the house mocktail, I am expecting something more than lemonade that happens to be purple.
When I was drinking, I loathed how much I'd invariably spend at a bar or a show on booze, and one of the most attractive things about sobriety had always been how much money you must save. I resolved that I'd order seltzers outside my house, which meant I could slam a few before hitting $10. I'd been too harsh against seltzers before; the bubbles, riotous and dependable, were worth the extra couple of bucks. Seltzers also helped me pace myself. I could probably drink a quart of phony negronis if given the opportunity, but there's only so much plain seltzer you can drink before booking a one-way ticket to burp city.
If all these mocktails were too marked up in bars, I'd simply buy them in batches to drink at home. A 12-pack of Phony Negronis® was $60 without shipping—not terrible, but not terribly cheap. Luckily for me, mocktails were trending. More people were buying non-alcoholic drinks, and more bars were expanding booze-free menus. You can get an Athletic IPA at basically any bar in Brooklyn now. So I started sampling some of the at-home apertifs recommended by Wirecutter, such as the uncannily ribbed bottle of Ghia, which I personally found blandly sweet after reading the brand's claim that it tasted like "summer on the rocks." My partner got me a bottle of a hemp-based spirit called The Pathfinder, which tasted like chewing on tree bark, but in a good way, I think. I enjoyed mixing the bark juice into seltzer, but the bottle was soon relegated to the back of the fridge and forgotten.
I realized I didn't really crave any of these drinks, at least not enough to feel anything but squeamish at the thought of buying more once I realized each of my fancy little Ghia seltzers cost about $5, turning an activity like "watching a movie on the couch" into a $20 affair. (The only store-bought mocktail I ever crave is the Ghia sumac & chili spritz, which I purchased at my grocery store for a mortifying $8 per can and savored over an entire month, sipping one spritz a week on a day that I deemed a special enough occasion.)
Now, more than a year out, what I do crave, and what I still want to drink endlessly, is non-alcoholic beer. I can easily crush three cans a night alongside a movie. I still do try and pace myself, if only for my wallet, but I am sort of in love with the feeling of going back to the fridge for another with no cloud of worry about whether this one will push me over the edge or make me say something stupid. What it will do, reliably, is make me burp.
But there is no other drink that has made not-drinking feel, well, not like drinking, but like something new: not a way to lose yourself but a way to treat yourself. Non-alcoholic beer helped me remember all the other sensory pleasures of drinking that I had lost sight of in search of a buzz. The satisfying hiss and pop of cracking open a cold one at the end of a long work day. The feeling of companionship that comes after lugging a six-pack to a friend's house or a last-minute picnic. The familiar, clammy sensation of holding the sweaty bottle by its neck, just like all the times I wove through the crowd of a dyke bar, holding a drink for me and my crush and feeling unstoppable. Only now I truly am. Who else can do their taxes after cracking open a few cold ones?
Some non-alcoholic beers are better than others—my partner T swears by the Athletic golden ale—but I am no epicure. Any non-alcoholic beer is a pretty good beer to me; my favorite is Clausthaler, which T says tastes like ass. They might be right, but if this is what ass tastes like, I guess I'm a fan.
Occasionally there is a mocktail that will blow me away. Recently at a holiday party with an open bar—one that my former self would have exploited to ruinous personal effects—I had one of the most delicious mocktails of my life. The drinks consisted of just cantaloupe and shiso tea poured over four boulders of ice. Each sip was complex: honeyed, musky, minty. I suppose I could have knocked them back all night to get my money's worth. When I checked the restaurant's menu on the train home, I learned they normally cost $12. But I only wanted two. The drinks were so ambrosial that any more would have felt excessive.
I felt a pang of annoyance: If this were my relationship to alcohol, two drinks and done, I wouldn't be in the situation I am now. And then, for a second, a pang of wishful thinking: Had I suddenly fixed my relationship to alcohol? Should I give it another shot? Almost immediately, I came down to Earth and remembered: absolutely not. That's not how life works. At least I'm learning my lesson now, where the worst that can happen to me isn't blacking out on the street but paying $14 for a purple lemonade.
