(What I said specifically was: “I never write a novel in November, and I never experiment with sobriety in January… My thinking is, if you’re going to eliminate your vices, do it when it’s nice out. Never in frigid, salt-caked January, when the Christmas lights come down, and daytime is six hours long, and the whole city has seasonal affective disorder. January is the month for martinis.”)
Whelp, now I’m doing all of that shit, so hopefully I have learned something about making promises in public.
Yes, I’m reporting live from nearly two thirds of my way through this cursed hoochless tradition, not that I’m counting, and for some reason I picked this particular January to do it, perhaps the most January of all Januarys. The road salt is piled waist high on the streets. Construction crews are in the process of replacing the gas main under pretty much all of Windsor Terrace, and we wake up every morning to the dulcet tones of a pavement saw. An Arctic blast is coming next week, the same week that our government transitions from a well-intentioned yet ultimately regrettable gerontocracy to the undisguised viciousness of our restored oligarchy/fascist gerontocracy. And I’ll be there, watching through my fingers, sober as a judge and dry as a bone.
To my amazement though, so far being off the sauce has been pretty great. The best part is the improvement in my sleep, which is probably worth the price in itself. I don’t seem to be suffering much, so is it possible that healthy people and teetotalers are not the clowns I have always assumed them to be? Am I learning something here, and do you want to hear me go on about it? Hell no, you don’t. So let’s talk about this instead: there has been a renaissance in the world of near beer.
Behind the bar, Bill Shufelt, a thirty-eight-year-old former hedge-fund trader, who co-founded Athletic [Brewery] in 2017, drew me a pint of Two Trellises, one of the company’s seasonal N.A. brews—a hazy I.P.A. that he and the other co-founder, John Walker, Athletic’s forty-one-year-old head brewer, were test-batching. I had not raised a pint drawn from a keg since I quit drinking alcohol, exactly one thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight days earlier. The glass seemed to fit my palm like a key.
For the North American non-alcoholic-beer drinker, who was until recently shut out of the craft-beer revolution of the past twenty years, these are hoppy times. Back in 2016, you’d be lucky to find an O’Doul’s—the non-alcoholic swill brewed by Anheuser-Busch—in the far back corner of the deli beer fridge. Five years later, the Total Wine & More chain of superstores carries biscuity stouts and hops-forward I.P.A.s from more than a dozen N.A. craft brewers across the continent, including Athletic, Partake, Bravus, Surreal, WellBeing, and Brooklyn’s Special Effects. Although the N.A.-beer market in the U.S. is still tiny, at around two hundred and seventy million dollars, compared with Europe’s multibillion-dollar industry, it has grown by a third in the past year. American disdain for the liquid called “near-beer”—a derisive tag that is a hangover from Prohibition days, when non-alcoholic beer, defined by the 1919 Volstead Act as beer containing up to 0.5 per cent alcohol by volume (A.B.V.), was the only beer Americans could legally drink—appears to be finally lifting. (That 1919 definition of non-alcoholic beer remains the standard today.)
I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. I took a deep whiff—the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest.
When I cracked my first Athletic Free Wave Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA (before reading the 2021 piece above, which came up fortuitously in the New Yorker Instagram feed on Friday night) I was gobsmacked. I would feel the same way if Murphy stood up on his hind legs and recited some poetry. I think the last falsie beer I had was a can of retched O'Doul's, probably in the mid-nineties, and probably as a dare.
But this new beverage tech makes abstinence a cakewalk. Beyond Athletic there are dozens of brands available at my local bodegas. Montauk makes another fine IPA. Peroni makes a super quaffable NA version of its crispy self, and even Guinness 0.0 is remarkably acceptable. I’ve seen Oktoberfest styles and pilsners, shandies and lambics and lights. You might point out that I had been intending to save money and lose weight with this experiment, but I don’t remember asking for your questions and won’t be taking them at this time.
I guess this all happened a few years ago, in this dumb country at least, and is not exactly news, but as a recent visitor to Sobertown I have been super pleased to learn about it. And there is interesting if not quite as successful stuff going on in the liquor replacement world too. Just for fun, here’s a roundup of some almost boozes we’ve tried this month, in reverse order of tolerability:
Kin Euphorics Matchatini
One star. This was the first thing I tried as a replacement for my post-workday tipple, and after a sip I thought this month is gonna suck. It has the taste and viscosity of a green juice served in the chillout room after a spa treatment, and it’s a handsome emerald green in the glass. But it’s also simultaneously cloying and vegetal with a whiff of something unpleasant underneath, gasoline or gunpowder, especially as you get closer to the bottom of the glass. There isn’t a trace of tea in the taste, matcha or otherwise, though tiny letters on the bottle read GENTLY CAFFEINATED, which is not really what I’m looking for in a cocktail. The brand subtly implies that the drink is psychoactive in some way (the words “mindful” and “euphoric” are all over their marketing) but I didn’t experience any sort of bogus high. Avoid this.
A pricey mocktail at Lore in Brooklyn
I didn’t take a picture of the drink I had, but it looked sort of like this photo I stole from Lore’s Yelp page.
Two stars. This Indian-ish South Slope restaurant is on point, and I unreservedly recommend the fermented dosa, the sea bream ssam, and the duck leg confit, but this was my virgin experience with fake liquor in a restaurant, and I was underwhelmed by the product and mildly annoyed by its price. All the components in the drink were of high quality, and it had clearly been mixed with intention by a pro, but I feel schmucky paying urban cocktail prices for what amounts to a glass of mixers and flower petals. Maya loved her passionfruit Shirley Temple, so don’t listen to me.
Three Stars. I ordered this from Minus Moonshine, a liquor-free liquor store in Crown Heights that does local delivery as well as nationwide mail orders. It’s sort of interesting, mildly smoky, and would probably make for a decent Bloody Mary, but it’s also weirdly thin, and in the end it’s a bit disappointing.
Three Spirit — Nightcap (The Dream Maker)
Four Stars. This potion seems like some horseshit that Aaron Rogers would sip thoughtfully from a crystal skull on a private flight to an Ayahuasca retreat, but I definitely didn’t mind having a little glass of it, as if it were whiskey, before bed. Don’t get me wrong: it does not in any way resemble whiskey. It’s mildly sweet, and tastes like maple and warm spices. Everyone I’ve offered it to has replied with a firm but polite “no thanks.” More for me.
St. Agrestis Phony Negroni
Four Stars. Maya said this stuff tastes exactly like a negroni. I disagreed, but it does remind me of the amaro-flavored soft drinks I had in Italy over the summer, and we can’t seem to keep it in the house for more than a few hours.
Ghia Original Apéritif
Five stars. Just delicious. Now that I’m aware of it I can’t wait to mix whatever I have left with some gin on February 1st. They also make a very good carbonated soda, especially the Lime and Salt flavor.
Maya grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and we were out there in November for her uncle’s 90th birthday party. We also spent a few days in or near Hollywood with our friend Nan and her excellent German Shorthaired Pointer, Pruitt.
The morning we arrived we hiked the gorgeous Runyon Canyon, which was damaged by the Hollywood Hills fire last week to the extent that it is currently closed to the public until further notice.
Afterward we had margaritas and combo plates at the legendary El Coyote. We saw the booth where Sharon Tate and her friends had their last meal, but we ended up eating on the patio for Pruitt’s sake. We tried to hit the Griffith Observatory too, but it was too crowded, so we just drove around, past the Greek Theater and the Hollywood Bowl and a million other cool things, the girls doing that hyperspecific geographical data chant that Angelenos are prone to. As always, it was so good to be there. What a damn treasure this town is.
We bought the house in November of 2020, and Maya and I lived there alone for most of the still-weird winter of 2021. It snowed every day for months, at least the way I remember it, and I set up a desk in the unfinished loft space facing a big window looking out over the yard. I worked there all winter, and other than the theme from The Hateful Eight playing in my head as I watched the snow pile up, the house was very quiet. Maya’s job was all-consuming at that point, mine was not. I finally read Moby Dick. I got into chess.com, briefly, and the solo records of Lou Reed, even more briefly. I also came up with an idea for a fantasy novel which I’ve been bashing away at since.
I wanted to write something like True Grit, with that kind of virtuosic first person perspective, but I quickly learned that I don’t have the chops to pull off. I also wanted to set it in a world that’s like The Hobbit, which I think everyone except Jeff Bezos is finally sick of. But it turned out to be a good place to start, and it’s been with me since.
I know that this genre stuff is not everyone’s cup of tea, and if it’s not yours, no offense taken. The advice I always get is to try to write something personal, something that maybe no one else could write. If nothing else, it’s a peek inside my own skull, and if you see me sitting quietly for more than a few minutes, I’m probably thinking about it.
When the book is going well it’s a great sort of pleasure, but it’s also a massive pain in the ass, because of the haphazard way I’ve been working on it, often on my phone, laying in bed, bashing it out with my thumbs. Do not write your novel this way.
I’ve converted it from first person to third, and back, and one section is in second person, a failed experiment which will take a few days to correct. I switch from past to present tense at will, a likely distraction for the reader that I really need to make a final decision about and follow up with rewrites.
The tone is inconsistent. Sometimes it’s a fairytale, sometimes it’s a history book, sometimes a fantasy romance. I’ve been working on it for years, in all kinds of different moods. Characters evolve as I work on them over time, and I need to go back and rework all their earlier scenes to match.
I can’t seem to flesh out the ending, or one very important scene in the middle. I keep deciding instead to go back and add more backstory, new characters and perspectives and scenes. I’m hoping to achieve some level of interest or depth, but there is so much clean up work left to do too, and it takes so long, and I’m not sure how anyone actually gets one of these damn projects done, especially while working for a living.
Occasionally it occurs to me that all this time and effort could have been spent getting a PMP certification, or learning Italian. I philosophize to make myself feel better about it: the book is a bonsai tree and my job is to prune and tend it, not to reach an unattainable perfect end product. Some people like to knit or work on old cars, this is my deal, and it’s less masturbatory than video games, at least.
I wanted to be a novelist when I was a kid, because I liked to read and because a life of regular adult desk jobs seemed boring. But at this point that battle is lost. I’ve already spent my life at desk jobs. Seen the right way this is a freeing thought: my little novel can just be for fun. No one who isn’t related to me or paid to do so will probably ever read it.
Almost no one likes to read fiction anymore, anyway, and the best case scenario for a novel is a Netflix adaptation. When they get done with Gabriel García Márquez and Elena Ferrante, maybe they’ll have some money left to do my thing? They can release it without fanfare and stack it like cordwood beside all the others.
More likely: when I pass away the book will be a pile of dusty ones and zeroes in my locked Google Docs account, and after a duration of inactivity or corporate restructuring, it will be deleted by an automated process. That will be the story of it, and that will be fine.
But I struggle with that, too. I read Counter Craft by Lincoln Michel, a professor and novelist who likes to get all the way to the end of the books he writes, and one of his posts shook me up:
“In college, I had a friend whose father was an established author and was passing through the city for a festival…
I didn’t get to speak to him much, but at some point my friend somewhat jokingly said, “Dad, my buddy Lincoln here wants to be a writer.” The author turned to me with that weary uh-oh-you’re-in-for-a-tough-life-get-out-if-you-can expression authors tend to use in these situations and said simply, “Make sure to finish things.” Then he turned back to chatting with his agent.
The longer I’ve been a writer—and the longer I’ve been a writing professor—the more I realize this is the most useful advice. Yes, it’s basic. The best advice tends to be. There’s no magical secret out there. You have to do the work, which means you have to finish the work.
Finish things. Finish a story, then move onto the next. Finish a draft of a novel, then move onto the next draft. Finish the book and start the next. Finish. Just finish! If you can’t finish, you can’t get anywhere.”
I felt personally called out by this, and so, argh, now I’m trying to finish this damn thing. Let me know if you have any advice.
Did you happen to listen to Set the Twilight Reeling while in your solo Lou Reed phase?
Finish the damn thing