Sounds like a strange person if he can’t even enjoy a restaurant visit or even watching sport on TV without having cravings for alcohol or feeling guilty to not be able to participate in drinking. I can perhaps understand it if you stopped drinking alcohol a few days/weeks ago but after years of not drinking.
That’s an interesting takeaway, especially if you read past the first two paragraphs.
Even so, I found his various endeavors in the NA craft beer, wine and “spirit” sector far more prominent topics than his initial & fairly brief side note about his own recovery 
“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.”
Perhaps we should be grateful that neither genes, nor family history, nor other circumstances have led us down the path of addiction.
No thoughts on the craft beers?
I don’t think today’s technologies for N/A beer, wine or spirits are advanced enough that you can get N/A versions which can seriously compete with good versions of alcohol beers/wines/spirits but they are now good enough to compete with average/slightly below average alcohol versions. It really depends on the expectations for your N/A versions - if you drink them to have something in a restaurant/bar setting so that it looks like you are drinking beer/wine/cocktail they are good enough, if you do it to focus on the taste of these beverage I think one will be disappointed
I read the article. Traditional methods of removing alcohol is evaporation after completion. As one can imagine, it takes flavor away, along with other things. The new method mentioned stops the process of alcohol production from starting but keeps other standard flavor building processes. Makes sense to me but taste is the real determining factor and that seems to be the case with the writer, hence his overall experience and story. (no spoilers)
I can see how if you have a 40 year habit, and then stopped for 5 years, there’s both muscle/body memory but also a psychological and emotional response. I can see similar with cycling…started when I was 5 and got fairly serious but took a break for 8 years or so in my late 40s. When I started again, there was muscle memory (good and bad) but also the feeling that it was fun, exhilarating, which is the original feeling of cycling, even as very young. Of course YMMV.
Athletic beer is pretty good; have you tried it? My DH is a beer snob and prefers it to beer (less filling). I haven’t found a decent NA wine except for the bubbly Eins Zwei Drei mentioned.
I have tried many of their beers - they are decent and drinkable but don’t come close to good IPA/lager/wheat (but if one is looking for N/A beers they are currently one of the best options)
Thanks for posting this. Wahine and I have been fans of Athletic–particularly the Run Wild and Free Wave flavors for a while.
Athletic is in most local grocery stores, but strangely NOT poured by bars and taverns (a few have it in cans). I wonder why it isn’t much seen in draft. Perhaps the lack of alcohol as a preservative?
IMO, as good as Athletic is, it hasn’t yet fully become indistinguishable from real beer. But it’s so close, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. As the article recounts, this is a huge step forward if the beer placebo effect is going to work.
I would imagine because not enough people order it, so it would be tying up one of the taps when another beer would make the bar more money.
I’ve never had a NA beer that I liked, but will admit that my experiences with it are limited.
And TBH, when I don’t feel like drinking alcohol I usually also don’t feel like drinking something that tries to pretend to be an alcoholic beverage.
But I do love water. A lot.
Maybe, but I doubt it. Athletic is wildly popular here in the stores, so much so the grocers set up pallet displays.
My guess is either the brewer doesn’t want to do kegs, or the distributors who handle kegs want too much money.
The brewer does kegs.
That’s good. Haven’t seen the pilot program anywhere in WA.
I found this interesting: https://www.brewersassociation.org/association-news/non-alcohol-beer-on-draught-is-it-safe/
Oh, that is interesting. Ties in to why kids (and adults) used to drink beer 'cause it was safer than water.
Don’t know if it’s new or not, but I noticed that my local (West Seattle) Trader Joe’s had 2 varieties of Athletic NA - hazy & something else. $11 or $12/pack.
IIRC you’re not a TJ fan, but is that a good price ?
It’s just an OK price. I’ve seen it as low as $10.99. Regular price around here is $12.99, like TJ’s.
