No Thanks, I’m Driving, And Nobody Blinks Anymore

I’m 45, which means I grew up in a Britain where this would have been unthinkable. Ordering a non-alcoholic anything at the bar in, say, 2005 was practically a confession. You’d get the look. That little pause from the barman, the raised eyebrow from a mate, the inevitable “everything alright?” as if a soft drink were a cry for help. There was an assumption baked into it. You were either pregnant, in recovery, on antibiotics, or being a bit of a wet blanket. Nobody’s business, all of it, but somehow it became the table’s business. So you either drank or you explained yourself. Most of us just drank.

I don’t want to overstate how much has changed, but honestly, it’s changed a lot. The numbers say so too: low and no beer sales in the UK are set to top 200 million pints a year. Somewhere in the last few years the whole thing quietly flipped. Now I can order a zero-percent Peroni and the person next to me at the bar is ordering the same, and neither of us thinks about it for even a second. The Guinness 0.0 is, and I will die on this hill, genuinely good. That same velvety pour, the ritual of the settle, the little cascade down the glass. Peroni’s alcohol-free does the job on a hot day when you want something crisp and cold and Italian-feeling but you’ve got the kids’ swimming at four. These aren’t sad substitutes anymore. They’re just the drink, and picking the best non-alcoholic beer is a genuine decision now, with real contenders. The same goes well beyond the beer taps, too: the alcohol-free drinks and spirits worth bothering with get better every month. The options are on the menu now, printed right there, not something you have to squint for or ask about apologetically.

What I like most isn’t even the beer, if I’m honest. It’s the absence of the performance. There’s no embarrassment in it now. No moment where I have to decide whether to make a thing of it or quietly hide the fact I’m not drinking. Nobody’s trying to top me up, “just the one, go on.” Nobody reads it as a judgement of their four pints, either, which was always the awkward subtext, wasn’t it? That by not drinking you were somehow commenting on everyone who was. That’s gone. You can be the bloke on the zero-percent and the bloke on his fifth real one and you’re just two blokes having a drink. Which is all anyone ever wanted.

I give a lot of the credit to the generation coming up behind me. The twenty-somethings I work around drink a fraction of what my lot did at their age, and the surveys back me up on that. There’s no bravado in it, no big sober-and-proud announcement, no white-knuckling. It’s just a genuinely relaxed relationship with the whole thing. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the no doesn’t need a reason. When I was 25 the social cost of not drinking on a Friday was real and everybody knew it. For them it’s a non-event. They’ll have a wild night out and be on the lime and sodas by half ten and nobody’s keeping score. I used to think that was a bit joyless. I’ve come round completely. They just skipped straight to the sensible bit that took me two extra decades to reach, and they did it without any of the guilt.

And that’s the thing underneath all of it. Choice without a story attached. I can have the real pint when I want the real pint. Christmas, a proper occasion, a slow evening with nowhere to be. And it isn’t only beer or spirits, either. The best non-alcoholic wines have come on in leaps and bounds too, which even five years ago I’d have laughed at. The rest of the time I can have the flavour, the cold glass, the round bought and the round returned, the whole social shape of the pub, and still drive home clear-headed and wake up without the low-grade fog. That’s not deprivation. That’s just more of the good bits and fewer of the ones I never much liked anyway.

So here’s to the normal-ness of it. Not a movement, not a lifestyle, not a hashtag. Just a quiet, unremarkable, brilliant bit of progress. The best kind, really. The kind where one day you look up and realise nobody’s looking at you funny anymore, and they haven’t been for a while, and you didn’t even notice it stop.

I’ll have another Guinness. The zero. And I’ll drive us all home.