I spent the night at a new alcohol

Jan 14, 2024

On one of the busiest shopping streets in the coastal town of Weymouth, a new pub called Dry Dock has just opened up. Inside what was recently an opticians, there is dark wooden mismatched pub furniture, a television, pool table, and a chalkboard with a list of drinks. I prop myself up at the bar on a tall wooden stool, and order a pint of a beer.

In every way, Dry Dock looks just like any of the pubs along the road. Except that this isn’t like any of those pubs, because you can’t get a drop of alcohol here. The list of drinks includes Guinness, Doombar, Brewdog IPA, Peroni, Corona and Budvar (which is also draught, at the bar), but they’re all alcohol-free, or 0.5 per cent alcohol or less, which is about the same amount of alcohol contained in a ripe banana. Across Europe and the US, anything below 0.5 per cent is classed as alcohol-free. In short, you can’t get even remotely drunk at Dry Dock, however many pints you order.

This alcohol-free pub celebrated its opening this month with a pub quiz, and enough people came to make up 15 teams. On Sunday morning, people came in to watch the England vs Spain Women’s World Cup final. Every day since it opened a couple of weeks ago, locals and holidaymakers have been in to have a drink.

Sam Watson, 39, is the man behind Dry Dock. A recovering alcoholic who used to run pubs and now works in an alcohol and drug addiction service, he has long dreamt of opening up a place where people can socialise in the comfort of a pub-like environment, without it being centred around booze. He pulls himself a pint and sits up at the bar next to me. He’s gone for a Free Damm (£4.80) and I’ve got a Lucky Saint (£4.80).

“Somebody in my personal life approached me and said that they felt that they were probably drinking a bit too much,” Watson says. “I wanted to go somewhere and have a nice evening with him and chat about how we could make things better, but I realised there was nowhere to go if you didn’t want alcohol. I then had this spark of an idea, to open my own alcohol-free establishment. I’ve always been a very sociable person, and I found that when I stopped drinking, when I got into recovery, I lost a lot of that. So I wanted to find a way to get back some of that. I’m also aware of the effect that isolation in Covid had on lots of people, who stopped socialising and ended up with huge mental health issues.”

Since opening, Watson’s had all sorts of customers: Couples, mothers with young children, a man in recovery, a woman staying sober after experiencing mental health difficulties, someone going through a divorce who has realised drinking, for them, is a bad idea, a group of men who like coming to play pool and start off the evening with an alcohol-free beer, before going for a Chinese meal where they might have a glass of wine.

“Some people here are drinking less because of health reasons, or they’re pregnant, or they’re driving, or they simply don’t like the fact that pubs can be full of pissed people. Others just like it as a community space they can sit and have a cup of tea in the day or the evening.” A local says he doesn’t drink any more as he wants to be healthier, and doesn’t like pubs as it’s hard to resist drinking once he’s in there, but he feels this gives him something of the pub atmosphere, “without the temptation.” A woman in her 40s says she’s four months into sobriety and the prospect of being able to socialise in an alcohol-free space is “miraculous” for her.

The UK is in a passionate, long-term love affair with booze, with much of our social life revolving around going for a drink. Yet government research shows that alcohol misuse is now the biggest killer of working-age adults in England, overtaking 10 of the most dangerous forms of cancer. Alcohol Change has found that people living in deprived areas are many times more likely to experience an alcohol-related hospital visit, or die from an alcohol-related cause. Weymouth, where Watson has opened Dry Dock, happens to be among the 10 per cent most deprived areas in the country. In 2020, when people weren’t socialising but were stuck indoors, alcohol killed more people in England and Wales than in any of the previous 20 years.

Yet, evidence is growing that we’re teetering on the edge of a sea change. Drinking among the nation’s teenagers and young people is on the decline – and in this June, sales of low- and non-alcoholic beer at Tesco outstripped those in dry January by 25 per cent. Retailers are picking up on this and launching lines of low- or non-alcoholic drinks; far more pubs and bars now offer them. In pubs, sales of low and no-alcohol beer have risen by 23 per cent during the past year, and have more than doubled since 2019, just prior to the pandemic, according to the British Beer and Pub Association.

Half the UK adult population bought a no-alcohol or low-alcohol product during 2022, according to the IWSR, a company that analyses the drinks market. Most intriguing of all, the UK’s largest recent study of drinking behaviours showed in 2019 that 16-to-25-year-olds were the most likely to be teetotal, with 26 per cent not drinking, compared with the least likely generation (55-to-74-year-olds), 15 per cent of whom didn’t drink.

A group of researchers, writing in publication The Conversation, found that young people now don’t see getting drunk “as a rite of passage”, they have concerns about “seeming responsible”, they’re more focused on physical and mental health, and they also have concerns about being caught out of control by phones and ending up social media. Binge drinking is simply not as cool as it used to be.

It’s early days for Dry Dock, and what happens to it long-term remains to be seen. Yet, all signs point to this being the perfect time for an alcohol-free pub like this. Watson has already had people from several other towns and cities including Bristol come to visit, inspired to set something up like this where they live. The fact a pub like this is receiving a warm welcome from a community seems indicative of a gap in the market.

Among all ages, there’s also been a rise of “positive sobriety” or “mindful drinking” movements, particularly in the form of online communities, and initiatives like Dry January, which attracted 130,000 participants in 2022, compared with 4,000 in 2013. The alcohol-free brand Lucky Saint said it had seen its volume growth rocket by 180 per cent in the past year. It even opened its own pub, the Lucky Saint, in London this March. It sells alcoholic drinks, too, but it champions its own alcohol-free offering.

But why is this happening? Professor David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, was the UK Government’s drugs adviser under New Labour but was sacked in 2009 by then home secretary Alan Johnson after claiming that alcohol is more dangerous than ecstasy or LSD.

“The sea-change is down to a combination of things,” he tells me, “but it seems absolutely clear now, that while alcohol is a great drug for socialising, it’s also harmful. Science has demolished the idea that there are health benefits, so the alcohol industry can no longer hide behind that pretence.”

Before his sacking, Nutt said: “I believe that the challenge of dealing with the harms of alcohol is probably the biggest challenge that we have in relation to drug harms today.” There was a petition for his reinstatement, and he received widespread support. “People are generally more health conscious,” he says, “and for many people the target is health, not hedonism. Health used to be seen as boring but now it’s become a goal in itself. People are starting to see that there’s one simple thing you can do to improve your health, and that’s to reduce your drinking.”

That’s not to say that the entire country is embracing sobriety – far from it – but fewer people are drinking. “In the last seven years, there’s been a change in the attitude of both young and old people towards alcohol,” says Nutt, “and there are people who are deciding to drink less because it’s harmful, it affects sleep, it affects relationships, careers, mental health, and the body. This ‘low and no’ movement is one of the biggest changes in attitudes for 100 years, since the temperance movement [a social movement that campaigned against the recreational use and sale of alcohol].”

Does Nutt think we will look back at our alcohol consumption with alarm, the way we now find it unthinkable that smoking was such a part of normal life? “Undoubtedly,” he says. “In the future, people will be laughing at the fact that we drank these toxins, willingly. So it’s important that we have a growing market of booze alternatives, because it used to be that not drinking was a sign of being an outcast. The only people who were allowed not to drink were alcoholics, and also top athletes. Alcohol has taken so long to come under scrutiny because it’s an extremely good drug, in that it can be fun and make people’s social engagement better, and so the alcohol industry has brainwashed us into believing it’s fine.”

That tipsy feeling can, for many, be one of the joys of human existence, which is why Nutt has spent the past three years developing a molecular compound called Alcarelle in an underground lab with fellow scientists. He hopes it will soon, if approved by regulators, allow people to get a bit drunk, without any of the downsides. In the meantime, as a stop-gap, Nutt’s company – named GABA Labs – has started selling Sentia, a drink made from plant extracts that is claimed to induce two-glasses-of-wine fuzzy feeling using botanicals.

In the Dry Dock, Watson and I are reaching the last sips of our pints. I decide I won’t have another one, as I’ve got an early start tomorrow, before remembering that my drink is alcohol-free. A nice realisation.

“If alcohol came onto the market now, it would be illegal, because it’s poison,” says Watson. “I don’t want people to sit in dark rooms drinking only water, I want people to enjoy their lives, but I do think drinking less is the future. We’ll one day look back to the days when people were getting arrested at night, and getting into fights, and their relationships were breaking down, and dying of liver disease, and we’ll fully see the damage that has been done.”

A man walking past Dry Dock stops to look in the window. There is a “no” sign outside with a wine bottle in a red circle with a red line through it. Even so, do people ever wander in, thinking they’ll get a stiff drink and then realising that this isn’t that sort of pub?

“I’ve had people walk in, realise, and then walk out immediately,” says Watson. “Others will realise once they’re in, then shrug, and say, ‘oh, all right, why not?’ The pub is a comforting place for lots of people, the etiquette is the same in pubs all over the UK, and so I think we can start to embrace the fact that alcohol-free places can also be part of that.”