The rise of the sober bar
bbc.com
bbc.com
One of the best part of pubs/bars is sitting down for a session and chatting for a couple of hours. A cold beer is still refreshing the second or third time around in a way that a sweet or hot drink isn't.
I can occasionally get lucky with a decent non-alcoholic beer in a bar, though it tends to be more miss than hit.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malzbier [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta_(soft_drink)
Sounds like it’s sweeter and maybe closer to an English malt beer than an Irish stout, but it sounds like it might be close
Tastes nothing like beer, but if you are just in it for the barley taste, it has a very powerful and delicious flavor.
Otherwise I'm generally of the opinion that Mikkeller make the best (or at least most interesting) non-alcoholic beers
I had an obsession with sprite/7-up one summer. The diet variety tasted awful and the regular not only was so high in calories, it was too sweet for me. I ended up with a 60/40 mix of club soda/sprite. It gives it a wonderful lightness while maintaining that great fizziness. It became my summer patio reading drink.
Unsweetened cranberry juice, ice and soda is my favorite.
You should check out Seedlip; it is a “non-alcoholic distilled spirit”, similar to gin. Mix with tonic water, cheers!
* Brew-dog Nanny State
* Erdinger blue
* big drop pale ale
* big drop stout
* Franziskaner 0.5
* adnams ghost ship
are all available in my local Tesco and all pretty great.
Almost every bar now has the usual alcohol free becks/heineken - but i must admit, like their lagers, they are pretty grim drinks, but i am finding that more and more are stocking nanny state or erdinger
So I stopped drinking alcohol and over time just began to prefer the clearer state of mind. Eventually, it just seemed like alcohol was unnecessary money and calories, and would end up tainting any free time I had ahead of me. So I preferred not to drink.
Not that I have anything against drinking alcohol in moderation but I really think there is a good opportunity to do interesting non-alcoholic drinks that you could have on a night out.
It "loosens" people up and tends to make people more friendly and open to socialize with (approachable), even some of the most defensive people I've met. Many in society today are fairly antisocial or fall into small groups at social events that can be more difficult to start a discussion and mingle with. They're frequently more judgemental at that point and may avoid people based on ill conceived prejudices, limiting otherwise worthwhile relationships they may form.
Alcohol helps break that barrier and lets people talk who would otherwise rarely, if ever, talk. Sometimes this is fruitful, sometimes it's not. It gives people a social "out" when it's not fruitful or their social groups judge/criticize them for talking to someone different/odd, "well I was tipsy."
If viewed as an optimization problem, alcohol effectively provides a stochastic gradient descent, mutation, momentum/inertia, annealing, or whichever minima escape mechanism you prefer to explore social spaces beyond what you've already found.
They both cause cancer. I think you are glorifying poison a little much
Then there are the clubs where most people are using some drug other than alcohol. It's obviously not quite the same, but I find it easier to avoid drinking when there are lots of other people keeping off alcohol to avoid killing their high. Generally, I've found the hardcore party people to have a healthy attitude that it's every person's choice what they do or don't put into their body.
It reminds me of my father's situation, who has been a vegetarian my entire life; growing up in rural Pennsylvania he'd quite often have to settle for ordering the mac and cheese from the kids' menu whenever we went out to eat anywhere. I think he'd weep with joy if he saw the sheer abundance of options available to my vegetarian friends in modern Boston.
They have non-alcoholic drinks and baked goods, along with things like card tables, darts/pool, video games, that sort of thing.
The article almost describes juice/smoothie bars which already exist and offer similar advantages.
and yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/getaway-new-york-2
There are a variety of historically enjoyable and useful establishments that may no longer serve as much of a population in todays world.
Perhaps sober bars are just the beginning?
-Sober bars
-Atheistic churches (social, life events, service)
-Shopless malls (social, activity, meeting place)
These already exist. I think Unitarian Universalist churches are the most common ones, but at least where I live we also have Sunday Assembly.
Because relatively few bars have anything interesting to drink that's non-alcoholic.
That said, from my experience some bars/pubs are more suitable than others to the non-drinker.
There’s probably a lot of great business ideas to address this but they are a little more complex to figure out because people who are not drinking don’t tend to make quite as many bad judgement calls on spending money for drinks.
edit: occasionally there's a bartender who really appreciates the DD and will go out of their way to make sure you have a good time and are willing to DD again. They rock.
Some bars are just slammed. Like, 40 feet of bar, entire front is 5 people deep squirming to get served by two people, and you have to literally scream at those people to get service. Ordering a $1.50 sprite in that environment is not only hellish for you, it's arguably a waste of the bartender and everyone else's time. There's a counterargument along the lines of "we all pay to be here, everyone's equal" but I wouldn't expect it to be a common take.
If you have a problem, yes, it's going to be extremely hard to resist.
Scarier still, you could be the victim of an innocent mistake. I don't eat dairy. My burgers come out with cheese on them by mistake maybe 10% of the time. When the kitchen's on autopilot, they absentmindedly make the default version of the thing, and there's no system to catch that mistake until it gets to me. That soda water becomes a gin soda really easily. If you just don't like alcohol, this is a trivial mistake. If you're in recovery, you are in serious danger.
But it's not that you can't resist. It's that you feel weird for resisting. I have a friend that didn't drink for many years. He got extraordinarily sick of having to explain himself. Even if the people you meet are 100% supportive, merely having the situation brought up can feel like a burden or like it singles you out. Many people find it hard to enjoy themselves in the shadow of this feeling.
If I don't want to drink, I take people to tea. You still have a pretense for sitting down in a strange dim room and having intimate conversation. Just without all the other bullshit. But I think an abundance of tea houses might require a fairly big city, at least in America.
First of all rent + labor is by far the highest cost of those three when running a bar. Secondly the sort of alcohol most places use in most cocktails is pretty cheap, and fresh exotic fruits, berries and other ingredients can be pretty expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if the raw ingredient costs of these cocktails are basically the same as most other cocktails.
But I always loved going to bars with friends and socializing. So this concept is quite exciting to me.
That's also why it's often recommended that you only drink alcohol or do drugs with people you 100% trust, especially if you're not used to it.
Go play a sport, a video Game, go grab a cup of coffee. Beat off to porn, have a cookout, go to a concert. Go watch a sports game.
If you feel left out.. So what? Then have a beer in moderation.
On the other hand, they are growing up in an era where weed is either legal or de-criminalized, so perhaps they just have more options.
I did the same thing as a student, because I didn't want to come off to my parents as a heavy drinker. Refusing a beer in front of them, then getting shitfaced with my friends the next night was a pretty common occurrence. You shouldn't take everything your kids say at face value -- and I don't mean that as a bad thing, kids should keep some secrets from their parents, it helps them grow up and learn to be independent.
Where's the big room full of people on comfortable couches enjoying some Smash Brothers?
Still, I'm not a huge fan of soda because it always leaves a sugary film in my mouth that I dislike. I'm a bigger fan of juice-based smoothies. I would love to see more nut/plant "milk" related options (with various spices for flavoring instead of sugar). Pistachio milk is delicious but I've only ever had it home made.
This is an incredible statistic. ..especially considering what it would be if you removed other drug users, religious abstainers and those who can't for medical reasons. Humans and mind altering substances..
It's been tough being in a neglected market but things are changing.
I mean, these spaces already exist. They're called Starbucks, Costa Coffee, and so on. They're fancy tea houses and smoothie stores or whatever. Why not just go there instead?
People don't dance at Starbucks.
-Bouncers often compulsively search you in order to make sure you don't bring extra alcohol inside
-Prices are at a ridiculous premium, typically to profit from the artificial scarcity but also in order to discourage and punish drunken behavior
-Loud party music galore
What exactly is missing?
No club is trying to discourage patrons to have drinks.
Also, some people like conversation. You can't have that at a nightclub
In many clubs there are also areas (usually smoking ones, but also backrooms, lounge areas, and so on) where the sound is muted and conversations (and other things) easily take place.
The best parties of my life were for all ages.
So instead of alcohol they serve nicotine-induced cocktails. Swap one drug for another. I'll stick to alcohol, thanks.
How did we get here?