Is it Safe for Sober People to Drink Non-alcoholic Beer?
“You’ve had two tonight,” my partner says as I drink the last of my alcohol-free beer.
“So? There’s no alcohol in them.”
“But you started off just having one occasionally and now you’re having two every night.”
“Yeah but… there’s no alcohol in them!”
My partner and I are both sober for over five years. It is one of the key things we have in common — a complicated history with alcohol and a passion for sobriety.
He still attends regular AA meetings whereas I have found other ways of maintaining my sobriety, as well as occasionally attending AA. So far, we both seem to be doing well with our different methods. For the first years of my sobriety, I veered away from 0.0 beers, but recently, I have become rather taken with them.
Am I risking my sobriety by guzzling non-alcoholic beers?
I couldn’t find much official research to answer this question, though many recovery websites advise against drinking 0.0s. Read on with the awareness this is very much a personal take. And feel free to share your stance too.
In the first year of my sobriety, I didn’t touch alcohol-free beer because it made me want to drink ten pints of the real stuff. When I was trying to manage my drinking, alcohol-free beer was like a taster for the beer proper. It knocked me off the wagon during my first attempt at Dry January, so I understand my partner’s perspective.
But I’ve been sober got five years now. I’ve seen through the illusion that beer makes me happy. I am very conscious of all the ways it did the exact opposite. I no longer even wish I could drink alcohol (most of the time). Though I still often wish others would stop drinking it. I don’t miss hangovers or getting stuck to my seat in the bar or spending my spare cash on booze.
Honestly, I feel entirely recovered from the drinking problem. But my partner sometimes worries about this.
“Eventually you’ll just drink a beer, though,” he says. “It’s inevitable.”
“No way! I haven’t got time to get drunk. I’ve got too much catching up to do.”
He’s not convinced and I don’t want to make him feel uncomfortable, so I promise I’ll cut back. But it’s hard to take his worries seriously, too. Alcohol-free beer is just a nice, unsweet drink. It’s not a crutch in the way beer was. It doesn’t give me confidence and power in the way Real Booze could. Thus I don’t covet it in the same way. There is no problem here, so far as I can tell.
Or is that justification?
My AA friends suggest I should be careful, and I feel like I am. My non-AA friends don’t see an issue. If I am being conscious about it, it should be fine.
What do you think? Do you drink 0.0s? Have they caused you to relapse?
Alcohol-free beer was not safe for me in the first year of my sobriety. In my second year, I noticed it unleashed a strange and familiar unquenchable thirstiness. So much so that I didn’t drink it again for a couple of years. But today, it just feels like a nice, not-too-sweet drinking option.
If you are thinking of trying it, consider your motivations. If you have a sponsor, talk it through with them. If you’re not in AA, but trying to quit, talk to friends and family members who have your best interests at heart.
My partner is right. I do need to be careful. I have worked really hard to become this comfortable not drinking, and this content with being alive. And it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always so simple for me not to drink. For many people, 0.0 beer will always be triggering. For lots of people, it just isn’t worth the risk.
But as with all elements of recovery, it’s about personal choice. And only you can decide. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you, and that is alright.
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Chelsey Flood is the award-winning author of YA novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers and a lecturer in creative writing at Falmouth University. She writes about freedom, addiction, nature and love, and is working on a non-fiction book about getting sober as well as a new YA novel.
She also has an illustrated newsletter about Autism.