2026-01-31 || Tags: alcohol life
This year, for the second time of my life, I did Dry January.
The rules are simple: No alcohol for the month of January. I did limit it to just alcohol. I didn't stop my smoking or anything else which is all relatively minimal - I think I smoked roughly a pack the whole month.
I didn't actually technically do alllll of Jan: I had a few beers on 1 Jan, and there was a beer festival on 31 Jan at my local. The reasons were pretty meagre - 1 Jan was a holiday and the wife and I were bored so we went to our local; and I thought that the beer festival would be a fun way to break my fast.
The main reason, and kind of really the only, was simply to prove to myself that alcohol is not a requirement in my life and, if needed, I can go without. Really just a test to see how in control of my vices I am.
I didn't do it for any health reasons or concerns or anything like that which I know some people do sometimes.
It's no shock that in the UK, pubs and drinking are a huge part of the culture. I have a local that I love and, when drinking, go to roughly once a week. My friends are there, the publican as a legend, the beers are delicious. Further to this, one of my wife and I's favourite things to do is to go for a nice long walk through some English country side, end up at a pub, and train back home.
I would say that at least 2 "events" (can't quite think of the right word) I do every week are directly related to the pub.
During Dry January, I didn't go to my local at all. This was quite a change. I did go to the pub a handful of times, once with a group of 6 or so friends, and quite easily managed to not drink any alcohol at all. Overall, I would say going to the pub was not as fun as usual and as I wasn't drinking, it just didn't excite me to go either.
A very big thing I noticed was, when socialising at the pub or other alcohol based social event, I suddenly seemed to have gained a social battery with moderately limited capacity. Normally, when drinking, I basically never want the night to end. I enjoy just everything about chatting away the night into the wee hours. When not drinking, I found that after 2 or 3 hours, I had just had enough. I stopped enjoying the company of these people I had easily spent 7+ hours with if drinking.
I made an effort to not let January's dryness not change what I do normally. The wife and I went to a couple of gigs, I went to one work social, and hung out with friends all as regular... except... there was one work event I didn't go to because of the no drinking. My workplace socials are quite heavy drinking events. The additional "pressure" of socialising with people I do not know overly well and/or don't really want to talk to sucked the fun out of that event in my head. I probably should've gone as there was social cricket alongside the drinking, but yeah.
The only substantial difference in "health" that I noticed was some weight loss. I didn't weigh myself before, but if I were to guess, I lost probably 4kg. I was previously doing a very loose one meal a day (OMAD) diet and mostly continued with that - except I did allow myself more calories overall mostly in the form of sweet treats I basically never eat.
No one is without mental health issues. I sometimes (like maybe once a month) get spells of anxiety and/or depression. I was hoping that no alcohol would change that. Unfortunately, I didn't notice any difference on that front at all. I had a bad month at work and I felt like the lack of alcohol (and everything that follows from alcohol consumption) didn't seem to make any difference to those anxious feelings.
To make the whole process easier, it is recommended to replace the alcohol with some other drink (AF options being an obvious one). I am pretty partial to an R White Lemonade and a Pepsi Max. However, the way I drink soft drinks - or perhaps better phrased, what I associate with drinking soft drinks - is just so wildly different that of beer that I never felt like they could be a sufficient replacement for beer. This is very particularly true when I went to a pub.
Fortunately, the alcohol free movement is actually really big. Especially in the UK it seems. As such, there are swaths of options available for really any type of alcohol. I'm not a huge wine drinker, so didn't really look into those (and I've heard they aren't very good). I do like a spirit occasionally as well, in particular gin and whisky. I have tried a couple of AF gins but have never been impressed. I didn't even look for alcohol free whisky - I can't in a million years imagine that would be good at all.
Alcohol free beer though, there are some options there...
I love beer - there's no two ways about it. I love the taste, I love the texture, I love the way it makes me feel, I love the flavour, I love the bubbles, I love the mouth feel, I love the variety. I just love it.
While the amount and range of alcohol free (AF) beers has exploded in the last maybe 10 years, I find that they just don't quite hit very well. They're good, and the partially fill a hole, but they aren't the whole thing. As far as the best tasting and best imitating ones go, Guinness 0.0 is head and shoulders above the rest. I don't think I could blind test that correctly. Unfortunately, Guinness is not really the beer for me. I find it weak and a bit blegh.
A very surprising standout to me was the Lidl home brand Perlenbacher 0.0%. This brand was cheap, had just the correct amount of bitterness, and overall just felt like a "good enough" regular crap beer. I don't drink a lot of regular Perlenbacher, but again, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference between it and it's AF cousin. (This is likely more to do with just the low standard of the beer and weird/not-good flavours coming part and parcel with cheap beers my brain just interprets any of those the weird flavours as just part of being a lower quality beer).
As a really good positive, the 6 or so different types I tried were all actually passable. I was happy enough drinking any of them all. There were two things that made me sad about consuming them though
The fact that AF beer costs the same (or only slightly less) than regular beer is an enormously frustrating thing to me. Obviously I don't have the full picture, but I had understood that a lot of the price of beer was in tax - something that wouldn't apply here.
My guess is that the resulting price is some combination of:
I suspect the latter could be emphasized by the fact that AF beer drinkers likely won't do "sessions" quite like regular drinkers do.
When drinking regular beer, I absolutely never consider calories. I think because I'm treating AD beers as more like a soft drink (of which I almost religiously drink no sugar), it crosses my mind a lot more.
The calories of AF beer just feel empty & pointless. Obviously, I could just drink Coke Zero at my local instead, but, as mentioned above, it just feels weird sinking 5 of those where AF beer doesn't.
Honestly, I found Dry January actually relatively easy. I proved to myself that alcohol is not a requirement in my life. I showed that I, I think, I don't have any sort of chemical or otherwise dependency on alcohol.
Not sure I'll do it again next year. We'll see.