One day when I was away from home, I asked my wife, Lisa, to look out for a case of BrewDog’s Nanny State and one of Bravus’s Blood Orange I.P.A. Within days, our doorbell was a-jingle with beer deliveries: cases of Surreal’s Chandelier Red I.P.A. (burnt toast and caramel), WellBeing’s Intentional I.P.A. (peach and pineapple), and BrewDog’s Hazy AF (clover, thistle, mowed lawn). All these beers are delicious, and some are flavorful to the point of funkiness, with billowy heads of foam and the fizz of added carbonation. But Run Wild remained my go-to. Those drinking more, and those choosing not to drink at all, have more in common than we think. Because it’s often after a period of drinking more (like, for instance, during a terrifying apocalyptic-vibed pandemic) that we choose to quit. And there’s absolutely no shame in that. That’s when we choose to quit most things, right? After a period of overuse, whatever that might look like. Fromme added that her bar lab had improved on Marlatt’s placebo. The researchers now serve subjects drinks made of cranberry juice, Diet Cherry 7UP, Rose’s Lime Juice, and decarbonated tonic, some spiked with vodka, others not. She also rubs alcohol on the glasses to add the smell. “You can’t tell the difference,” she said. Could I restore the old customs to my evenings, using non-alcoholic wine and liquor placebos instead of alcohol? When I ran my concept, “zero-proof therapy,” by George Koob, he pronounced it “very dangerous.” To Lisa, it sounded like an argument made by Wile E. Prevaricator, once and future alcoholic—a clever way to introduce and rationalize the idea of my returning to real drinking.

Fromme’s students continue to use balanced-placebo-design methods to study the role that alcohol plays—and doesn’t play—in sexual arousal, domestic violence, and disinhibited behavior. (Most researchers, however, no longer study a group that expects tonic but receives alcohol, because few of the participants are fooled.) “Does alcohol really make you more aggressive, or do you think, I’ve been drinking, so I can be disinhibited?” Fromme said. “Does alcohol make people more flirtatious, or do they believe that drinking gives them permission to be more flirtatious? It’s all about what you expect to happen.” Drinking hoovered up my time, energy and money like an anteater on ants. Now, I spend these precious finite resources on things such as yoga, living in different countries, writing books, (very) amateur photography, parenting a puppy, running, art galleries, paddleboarding, reading about psychology, cycling on the seafront in Brighton. When people ask me, ‘What have you replaced drinking with?’ I find myself confounded. There’s no singular answer. Because the answer is – everything that is pleasurable about my life. I’ve replaced a kind of half-life, where I limped along constantly hungover or jonesing for a drink, with a full-life. He spent two years studying the industry. In the U.S., “there was no belief in non-alcoholics as a business,” he told me, gesturing with his glass of Two Trellises. “It had been an eighty-to-one-hundred-million-dollar industry with zero innovation for thirty years.” If you find yourself at this dilemma junction, you’ve probably already spent many years trying and failing to ‘reduce volume’. Drinkers who don’t struggle to ‘moderate’ (ie. those who drink one or two and then stop) don’t really contemplate quitting booze. Why? The negatives of their drinking have probably not outweighed the positives yet. It’s hard to experience many negative offshoots from a few glasses of wine over the course of a week. So by the time people arrive at the notion of potentially quitting altogether, or ‘harm reduction’, they’ve most likely already established that they are not a moderate drinker anyhow. Few people are, as it happens. They’re rare. I can count the ‘moderate drinkers’ I know on one hand. So by all means, try a moderation experiment, many do before alighting on quitting altogether. It’s often the final ‘convincer’. The irony is; none is far easier than one. Cold turkey sounds petrifying, but it’s easier overall. Shufelt, still at the hedge fund, would get up early to call brewers in Germany. German brewers have traditionally relied on “arrested fermentation,” a process that stops the beer from becoming alcoholic in the first place. Roger Barth, a professor emeritus of chemistry at West Chester University, and the author of “ The Chemistry of Beer: The Science in the Suds,” explained to me that brewers can use special yeasts, and remove them from the “wort”—the mixture of water and maltose that is the mother brew—before the yeasts fully ferment the sugars and the starches. “Timing and temperature control are critical, because the fermentation must run long enough to generate desired flavors but short enough to curtail ethanol production,” Barth said. “This is difficult to control.”Early to mid-term recovery is an absolute blast, but also a terrifying tightrope, whereas from year four on, you’ve totally gotten used to not feeling like an extra from Walking Dead on a Saturday morning, so the gleam of that wears off. Making 9am yoga class feels less like a revelation, and more routine. ‘So what?’ We know now that being teetotal for one, three, even twelve months brings surprising joys and a recharged body... but nothing has been written about going years deep into being alcohol-free. We know now that being teetotal for one, three, even twelve months brings surprising joys and a recharged body… but nothing has been written about going years deep into being alcohol-free. Ethanol was what I had tasted on that first sip, and my body, after five years free of it, had immediately detected the toxin. By the second sip, the molecular cascade had started, and by the third sip the poison was delicious. No other author writes about sober living with as much warmth or emotional range as Catherine Gray. Her deep insight into the subtle psychologies of drinking, and of life, means that everything she writes is both utterly relatable and stretches our minds. Hers is a rare wisdom.' - Dr Richard Piper, CEO, Alcohol Change UK

And that takes guts. Many drinkers go their entire lives imbibing on default without questioning it, or even trying the alternative. And here you are, examining your drinking life, rather than leaving it unexamined. We’re proud of you already. How has the process of writing about your sober journey been and have you found it helpful to be open about your personal experience? When the beer finally started to taste good, they bottled samples to take around to regional distributors. Their big break came when Shufelt met with the Whole Foods regional buyer in New Jersey. “He was our first believer,” Shufelt said. Is this getting a little weird?” she said. Lisa doesn’t have a drinking problem, but twenty-five years with someone who does had made her a reluctant expert. How long do cravings last? The answers are as variable as the drinkers. An abstaining young person might master the urge to drink within a matter of months, but if you drank for forty years, as I did, the Pavlovian groove is deeper. After I’d gone three years without alcohol, my cravings seemed to have been extinguished, but I waited five years—the length of time that some cancer doctors use to declare a patient cured—before I tried to return to the rituals of social drinking, without the alcohol.We looked at each other. I rushed into the kitchen and fetched the bottle. Nowhere on the label could I see the words Alkoholfreier Wein. I gave the bottle to Lisa, who had her glasses on. I asked if she had ever used real beer and a non-alcoholic beer placebo in the lab. She had not, she said, because the alcohol content in beer is much lower than in vodka: “Vodka gets people to 0.08 faster.”

The new book from Catherine Gray - icon of the Quit Lit movement and author of The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober Ergo, many teetotallers have once been the last one standing at the bar. The one hounding their mates to go to a club. The ones who found it pretty easy to polish off a bottle of wine on their own. (The former two scenarios feel alien right now.) During the pandemic, many of you may have discovered that what you’d previously pegged as a ‘social’ drinking habit, became a runaway ‘at-home’ drinking habit. And no bloody wonder, given the impending doom we’ve been surrounded with over the past year, like a moat of snapping crocodiles. The number one advice I would give is to immerse yourself in the teetotalin’ world. Listen to every podcast you can, read every book, follow sober influencers, join Facebook groups, find alcohol-free role models in the shape of great thinkers, artists, writers and actors who are ‘out’ (there are lists of these in both The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober and Sunshine Warm Sober). A good rule of thumb, and advice given to me very early on, is to spend as much time thinking / talking / reading about sobriety, as you did drinking. As time rolls on, the ‘immersion’ time you’ll need will become less and less. But in the beginning, I treated learning about being alcohol-free much as I did studying for a degree. Best of all, at a Fourth of July party at our house, I was able to drink my Run Wilds while the guests drank their craft beers. The laughter seemed louder, the smiles seemed brighter, and my companions were none the wiser that I was drinking a placebo—a necessary condition for the psychological effects to work. Still, I was reminded of how I used to conceal alcohol. Now I was concealing non-alcohol. Whether you're a dedicated boozehound, flirting with teetotalling, or already sober, this witty, gritty read may just change how you think about alcohol forever.Just as I was shutting down my home bar lab, two bottles from Leitz, the German vineyard, arrived via UPS. One was the Eins-Zwei-Zero rosé, and the other the famous Riesling. I put both in the fridge. Catherine has been sober for over 7 years now. While her first book explores the early stages of change and the learning along the way, this one provides guidance on long-term change. Sunshine Warm Sober: Unexpected Joy That Lasts is all about what comes next. She notes that many people can manager shorter stints of sobriety, but that many find the longterm change the struggle. This book inspires hope for a brighter future, where alcohol isn’t centre stage. Catherine shares her own experiences and learnings, this is a refreshing and honest read. She encourages the reader to think beyond quitting drinking and look at the big stuff. What do we want life to look like? What boundaries do we need to set? If you are seeking longterm change and a life without alcohol, this book is a great tool to have in your kit. Six per cent? Doesn’t sound like that much, right? But that’s a sizeable jump. Potentially four million people, if that stat can be taken as representative of the bigger picture of the UK’s population. Searches for ‘how to get sober’ peaked