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The thing about life, whether you are alcohol-free or a raging alcohol dependent, is it is full of ups and downs. Highs and lows, good days and bad days. The big difference is that people who choose to live alcohol free now have to figure out how to handle the rougher days without leaning on a glass of wine or a shot of tequila. Tricky, tricky, tricky.

Just last week I was riding high on life!! I had finally published this blog, had pulled off an excellent event at work in celebration of Women’s History Month and was excitedly seven weeks pregnant. “Hurrah for me!” I proclaimed as I raised a glass of NA beer in celebration. 🍻

And then, trauma.

Maybe I took on too much, maybe I worked too hard, maybe it was just never a viable fetus. Either way, I started bleeding and I miscarried and now I have to deal with the fall out. Stone. Cold. Sober.

What non-alcoholic drink can even begin to help me with this? How can I be riding so high one minute and then fall so low the next? Will this be the trauma that tips me over the edge and makes me start drinking again? Thankfully, I already have answers for all of these questions because “Hurrah for me!” I am actually over a year alcohol-free and I have mechanisms and a support network in place for exactly this kind of shocker.

Question & Answers

1. Q: What non-alcoholic drink can even begin to help me with this? A: Tea, obviously
2. Q: How can I be riding so high one minute and then fall so low the next? A: That’s life. Suck it up, buttercup
3. Q: Will this be the trauma that tips me over the edge and makes me start drinking again? Never! Re-read ritual and get a grip.

This morning, as my body was bleeding and my tummy was cramping, I sat alone on my porch with my lemon water and I did my meditation. Harder than I had been meditating recently. With extra focus and extra fervor. And as I came back to this most critical daily practice, I remembered about the willpower in the bank aspect of this affirmation-based ritual. What I do in the mornings is setting me up for sanity in the afternoons and evenings and enabling me to fiercely and furiously continue to become the best version of myself I can be.

Then I made tea. A proper cup of tea. The only kind of tea that can really heal in these kind of moments. British, builders tea. Made with proper tea bags with water hotter than the sun. Cooled only a smidgey bit by a dash of whole milk. No, you cannot switch out cow’s milk for almond, oat, cashew or coconut milk, and still expect the same delicious and soothing beverage. This is British tea, done right.

A Proper Cup o’ Builder’s Tea

Sip slowly and let the magical powers of a proper British cuppa heal whatever ails you

I first read this perfect quote from Homer Simpson whilst in Bruges, Belgium circa 2010. I was staring at a wall of beer, belly full of beer, learning about beer, about to drink more beer and eat a bowl of moules frites. Bruges is the most stunning city with the most delicious food and Belgian beer at every turn. Bruges is beer mad and literally has beer flowing through the cobbled streets – in an underground pipeline! With an annual beer festival with over 400 beers, Bruges is a beer-lover’s paradise. I spent a wonderful, boozy, long weekend there and I remember it so fondly.

It is these kind of memories that make the initial idea of giving up drinking alcohol simply impossible. An untenable idea. Unrealistic. Life-destroying. Utterly incomprehensible. Before I gave up drinking, I would think thoughts like:

• What, so imagine a life where I never go wine-tasting again in a gorgeous vineyard? How awful.
• I can’t sit in a beer garden and drink crisp, cold ciders on a warm summer day? Yikes.
• I’ll never again enjoy a jolly Sunday Roast, lubricated with lashings of red wine? Life is over.
• The pleasures of sharing good pizza, cold beer and boozy banter will never be mine again. Ugh.

These imagined sacrifices put me entirely off the idea of a sober life and stopped me from quitting drinking alcohol time and again. Life just didn’t seem worth living if I couldn’t enjoy it, and the things I enjoyed all hinged around drinking. Those activities, trips and outings were part of the fabric of my life and for the longest time, I thought those activities were dead to me if I couldn’t have a drink. It is only since giving up drinking, in fact, that I have discovered that I can still take part and enjoy those kind of activities, I just need to switch up the drinking accompaniment. And there is no more noble and advanced non-alcoholic accompaniment than the non-alcoholic or near beer.

Originally, “near beer” was a term for malt beverages containing little or no alcohol (less than 0.5% ABV), which were mass-marketed during Prohibition in the United States. Near beer could not legally be labeled as “beer” and was officially classified as a “cereal beverage”.

Wikipedia

Becoming sober curious was not my first rodeo with non-alcoholic beer. I first discovered it when I was pregnant with my first child, but back then the market was limited and it seemed like there was only dusty old O’Doull’s as an option. I would keep a few O’Doull’s in the fridge and enjoy them with a pizza, the perfect pregnancy solution but ultimately only tolerable for a maximum of nine months (and even that was pushing it). Thankfully, since then, the non-alcoholic beer market has absolutely exploded and the upsurgence of craft ales that are both alcohol-free and tasty is truly astounding. Alcohol-free breweries like Athletic Brewing Co here in San Diego are changing the game and providing space and notoriety for these previously frowned upon near beers. Their flavors are complex and well crafted and truly good enough that they’ve ‘tricked me’ into enjoying them to the nth degree. These badboys are life-savers to me and have played an important role in me figuring out my alcohol-free life. If beer is the bedrock of booze then these new non-alcoholic beers are the backbone of my journey to sobriety.

Over the course of coming months I intend to show off a number of my favourites in this category but in the meantime, here’s my top list:

Enjoy and keep it up!

I drink because I am depressed, I am depressed because I drink. Sound familiar? I used to be on an eternal rollercoaster with my binge-drinking, with euphoric highs of super fun, wild and rambunctious drinking adventures, followed by deep troughs of self-doubt, paranoia, anxiety, self-loathing and ‘The Fear’. I thought my sister Victoria and I invented this term, however, digging deeper, it can be defined as follows:

“The Fear” – The feeling the morning after the night before when you were so scuttered that you can’t remember chunks of the night and have an unnerving sense that you managed to offend at least two of your friends and probably embarrassed yourself while trying to order a kebab from a cash machine.

The Ultimate Irish Slang Guide

For me, the older I got, the worse ‘The Fear’ would become, largely because my memory-loss after drinking had become consistent and significant. My hangovers started to last longer and longer, stretching up to two days, while my wellness days were so few and far between before I hit the booze again that I would become very blue, very often.

Here’s how my week used to look (pre-kids):

• Thursday is the new Friday 🍷
• Friday Night, start the weekend off right 🍸
• Saturday Night, Party Night 💃🏻
• Sunday Blues – Hangover Day 1 😱
• Monday Monday – Hangover Day 2 🫖
• Fresh Faced Tuesday – Wellness Day #1 💪🏻
• Wednesday Hump Day – Wellness Day #2 🤸🏻‍♂️
• Thursday is the new Friday 🍷
• Friday Night, start the weekend off right 🍸
• Saturday Night, Party Night 💃🏻
• and so on…
• and so forth…

More recently, even though I wouldn’t drink so often, I always drank to excess and would wake up after a drinking occasion and need to ask my husband if I ‘did alright’ the night before, checking in with him on who I had offended or how my behavior might have impacted our children or my health.

Thankfully, I have not had an alcoholic drink for 388 days which means I have not had a hangover or ‘The Fear’ in well over a year and I can confidently say that my anxiety, depression, mood swings and overall blues have significantly reduced. The impact on my overall well-being from not drinking alcohol is so holistic not just because of what I have given up but also because of what I have taken up and the non-alcoholic wellness drinks that have replaced the toxic alcoholic drinks I used to survive on. This particular one here contains spirulina which is a potent source of nutrients and known to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and brain-protective properties. Sacred Life raw kombucha by GT’s Synergy is made with raw coconut water and silky blue spirulina finished with fresh-pressed ginger. It is absolutely delicious and when topped with sparkling water, creates a cider-like hydrating wellness mocktail which is bright blue in color. Here, I’ve used dusty purple glassware to accentuate the blue and make it extra fancy. These glasses were a birthday gift but these ones here look equally fabulous. The rose-shaped ice cubes are a nice finishing touch.

Enjoy and stay strong!

It is a well known fact that British folks like tea. And Brits from the mighty North of England arguably love drinking tea more than any other Brits. And me, I like drinking tea even more than the average Northener. As a kid, my family would drink tea at the dinner table every night with our meal. We would make a very large tea pot and drink it with tea cups and saucers, milk in a milk jug. Tea was as big as booze throughout my life! I remember back when I worked at JWT London, our team had a tea tray, and we would each take it in turns about 5 times a day to do a run to the tea station at the corner of every floor of the building, to make the five or six mugs of tea ordered by the desk pals, and carry them back to our area. Getting everyone’s order just right was critical: knowing who liked a splash of milks versus juuust a touch. Who had a sweetener and who wanted sugar. One lump or two?

Now, enough about JWT London. Here is why I absolutely bloody love tea:

• Healing powers, raged about for eternity
• Drinking tea, and I mean lashings of glorious tea, hydrates you immensely
• Variety of types and flavors caters for all occasions
• Therapeutic and calming qualities of slowly sipping a hot drink
• Proven at having lasting impact on your wellness
• Tea is a major multiplier: hydration + regular bowel movements + clearer skin
• Drinking tea while watching shows is an excellent booze replacement

Moringa with Spearmint & Sage Tea

It’s important to me at this stage to credit the inspiration who finally got me over the edge and got me to quit drinking: Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol.

I was ⅓ way through Quit Like a Woman when I quit drinking, the day after Super Bowl LV. I was the designated driver for this occasion, where we would head to friends who were playing the game. My hubby hubs wanted to watch the game, I wanted to watch the commercials and eat chips. Everyone’s a winner. We headed over and hung out. The ‘dad’ poured me a Costco pre-mixed margarita, super-sweet, super-boozy, super yummy. Josh and I had agreed I could have ONE. We had over three hours of sports before I would be driving us home so I drank it and enjoyed it and managed to keep to my ONE drink limit . I enjoyed the day and drove us all home safely later on that evening. However, that wasn’t for lack of trying. The ‘dad’ kept trying to get me to drink more margaritas. He knew that I would be driving my husband, two children and dog home in a few hours and yet kept pushing me to have another. Yikes. And yet of course he isn’t the first or last person to try and get a designated driver to drink more than they should. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it and it’s part of the ‘culture obsessed with alcohol’ that Holly rages against in her book.

Thankfully, something about those sickly sweet, hangover-inducing pre-mixed margaritas was not tempting enough to risk it and I stood firm and switched to soda (plus chocolate brownies and the afore mentioned chips). That night, when at last I got tucked up in bed with Holly’s book and a cup of tea, I dived into her anecdotes and advice and finally started to pick up what she was putting down. I am thrilled to say that the next day I made a decision to never drink alcohol again… and to never question that decision.

My best advise is to invest in the holy trinity of a G&T: Good Gin, Good Tonic & Good Glassware. My chosen glasses here are Waterford Marquis whiskey glasses and my tonic water of choice is Fever Tree but Schweppes and Q Tonic are also very good. Always over-index on the squeeze of citrus.

We were a fun family, except that there were plenty of tales where alcohol had negatively impacted our family history. A summer fête at school, a perfect day, ruined by booze. A graduation night ruined by booze. A wedding ruined by booze. A birthday ruined by booze. You get the drift. A pattern of over-drinking, or what we call ‘binge drinking’, the least classy way to consume alcohol! YUK. Us Brits aren’t sophisticated drinkers like the French, nope, we drink with the sole purpose of getting drunk and for many, the drunker the better.

But not anymore. Welcome to my new day. After twenty five years of binge drinking, I can safely say, hurrah, I am done. I have decided to never drink alcohol again and to never question that decision. So cheers to that!