Let's Have A Drink (Of Some Sort)

Socializing shouldn't be paywalled behind alcohol

I received a great comment on my recent piece about my hometown’s “Sip & Stroll” event. Sip & Stroll is held monthly, and it basically means you can walk around with an alcoholic drink, on one of the town’s main commercial streets. The idea—which I like but express some skepticism about its effectiveness—is that this will attract people and get them moving around and supporting local businesses.

But the comment centered not on the stroll but on the sip:

Another reason to keep the coffee shop open: non-drinkers! I have friends I wouldn’t invite out for a beer but who would certainly tag along for a latte. Missing the opportunity to expand the field of interested folks.

(I had noted that the town’s main coffee shop, on the same street as the brewery, didn’t extend its hours for the Sip & Stroll night.)

My friend and I, with whom I drove and walked around Flemington and talked local business and economics, touched on this too—on how one of the things we do to give ourselves an excuse to linger somewhere is to have an alcoholic drink. That’s a “doing something” that lets us feel like we’re not loitering or playing hooky or whatever.

He mentioned a shop in New Hope, the larger, hipper, more bustling Pennsylvania town across the Delaware River from Lambertville, that sells kava drinks. (The reviews say they also serve kratom, which the Mayo Clinic warns against consuming and which some say is addictive.) Kava is a plant that contains a stimulant, and it’s supposed to make you feel “good,” like a tipsy or mild high feeling, without impairing your ability to think or drive.

Now I’ll acknowledge that this is probably not for me. I’m not even sure I’d try it; it’s a little too drug-adjacent for my taste, especially with the shop’s vaguely magic/New Age theme. Although I will say this: I like the idea of making drinks, which basically mirrors the idea of creative cocktails. It underscores that the point is to actually enjoy a thing and to have some sense of taste or craft, and not just to feel the effects of the substance, whatever it is.

That’s what I like about alcoholic drinks: there’s an element of connoisseurship. There’s the appreciation of flavor notes in beer, the craft of food pairings with wine, etc. That strikes me as a category difference with, say, marijuana edibles, where at most the food item is a delivery vehicle for the drug. (I guess maybe the social element comes afterwards; I’m not a partaker, so I can’t tell you.)

I guess I’m old fashioned here: if it’s familiar old beer and wine, or weird New Agey stuff that might or might not have unfamiliar or harmful effects, I’ll stick with the (yes, occasional and responsibly consumed) beer. Frankly, thinking through stuff like this makes me get what animates a lot of NIMBYism. Maybe “We’re going to shun alcohol, which we know well and have been consuming for millennia, for untested substances whose only purpose is to make you high?” is my “They’re putting apartments in our quaint little town!”

So I’d say this is the key: not to identify a safer substance than alcohol to do something like get you tipsy, but to find something to make lingering and socializing feel natural and appropriate. To find something that, like a real wood fire, acts as friction or glue for people to hang together.

People should have options, in general. The cost of hanging out somewhere inside without a time limit and any particular expectations should not be alcohol consumption.

Yes, part of the appeal of bars, and winery tasting rooms and microbreweries and craft distilleries and cideries is, obviously, getting a little tipsy. But I actually do think that misses a big part of it. The social element is at least partly independent of the alcohol element. These are places that are formatted and set up to hang out and linger. There’s a design element. That isn’t all just an excuse to drink alcohol. I think that drinking alcohol is simply the path of least resistance to getting that setting. If you go to breweries and wineries a lot, surely you’ve had visits where you don’t really feel the alcohol at all, because you have just one drink, or drink slowly, or with food; doesn’t that prove that feeling drunk isn’t the reason for it?

I guess I would say that to some important degree, we’re so used to seeing that business format—relaxing, leisurely place to sit awhile—paired with alcohol that our ability to see what we’re looking at is narrowed, and we don’t realize that the two can be separated. (There’ an analogy here with how people conflate cities with the urban problems of the 1960s, and to some extent miss that cities can and do exist independently of their problems.)

Compare the vibe of a typical microbrewery or winery with the closest common thing, a coffee shop. Some coffee shops are cozy and invite lingering—for example, they have nooks and crannies, seating areas away from the line or counter, or comfy furniture. But increasingly, most of them are designed to sit briefly or grab your order and go. (Starbucks, which popularized the notion of “third places,” is now actively redesigning their stores to discourage lingering.) Typically coffee shops are just square or rectangular floorplans, where you’re in full view of the staff and not far from the scrum of the line. The design is telling you to get going.

Tasting rooms, on the other hand, often boast more interesting structures and floorplans and interior designs. This makes sense, because more goes into beer, and especially wine, than goes into starting a coffee shop, and there’s more expense and more craft to it, in general. You can plan on spending a couple of hours at one of these places. You can almost always bring your own food and have a couple of drinks with your meal. (Since most coffee shops don’t serve meaningful food, I think they’d permit you to bring some kind of lunch in. But it’s not usually done, and people like to do what’s done and expected and encouraged.)

Also consider that one of the big profit streams for these places is people bringing home bottles or growlers, or joining “clubs” (subscription-based quarterly buying of pre-selected bottles, typically). So part of the business model is having people try more than one thing the place makes. Coffee roasteries will sell their beans, but 1) they’re usually very expensive and 2) they’re just kind of there, almost on display. And in any case, most coffee shops are not roasteries.

I’m actually wondering, what if someone ran a coffee shop like a tasting room? What if the design and menu were crafted to make you stay, and try more than one item? To bring food and consider how food or small bites pairs with coffee drinks? Food and coffee pairing is actually a thing!

My favorite local coffee shop has a neat menu item: an “espresso flight.” It contains three or four different espressos (I haven’t tried it before), which lets you actually explore their menu in a way that’s kind of difficult to do with coffee shops. The get one drink at a coffee shop but get two or three at a brewery (or of course, a flight) is just a habit, not a rule.

I guess the other issue is caffeine, and while you can have two or three alcoholic drinks in the afternoon or before dinner and still sleep, maybe you can’t consume three espressos and sleep. (I know I can’t; some people can. I don’t know if there are enough for a coffee shop to really fill this niche.) That’s what decaf is for, though. That’s also what herbal tea drinks are for, which fancier coffee shops also tend to serve. (How about a “night menu” with more diluted/decaf coffee drinks and other flavors and interesting non-caffeine drinks? “Coffee cocktails”? The more you think about it, the more you can think of ways to brand and sell it.)

Some bubble tea shops are kind of like this too, and late-night/after-dinner bubble tea (some varieties of which have no actual tea in them) is more common than late-night coffee. Some tea shops are designed to sit or hang out, but most of them are set up for in-and-out grabbing a drink.

Part of this is maybe that being on the street with an alcoholic drink is typically not allowed, so by necessity alcohol-serving establishments are optimized for making lingering comfortable. (In that sense, the Sip & Stroll concept is actually making a tasting room do business more like a coffee shop, which is interesting.)

The point being—for reasons not entirely to do with alcohol itself—alcohol consumption is one of the primary go-to activities as a means to explore or linger in a small town or neighborhood. In that sense it’s a means to an end, and there are other means to that end. The question is, what else can there be that fills the “Let’s go visit [X small town] and try their microbrewery!” Why does that sort of anchor a half-day somewhere and other things don’t as much? How much of that is anything real, and how much is just habit and expectation and design?

I don’t have anything against alcohol and I don’t really have anything against kava. “Bars” that don’t get you drunk is a cool and underserved business idea. I’m not going to stop the dispensaries, either, man. But beyond that, trying to find a different substance to replace the alcohol might be less important than finding a way to capture the social and economic role that alcohol-serving establishments play in towns and neighborhoods.

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Related Reading:

Drink And (Let Him) Drive

Housing Pluralism

Being A Part Of It

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