This is part of Wet February, a series about America’s increasingly muddled relationship with drinking—and how to sip your way through it wisely and well.
To understand America’s changing habits around drinking and diet, consider how Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur turned life-extension-and-wellness guru, chose to mark last year’s Thanksgiving holiday.
The average Thanksgiving meal, Johnson warned on social media, was “roughly equal in metabolic injury” to smoking seven cigarettes. He tabulated the average calories, fat, carbs, sugar, and salt of the typical spread, all high. And he painted a picture of the damage the meal would do to one’s body: “massive glucose spikes,” “oxidative stress,” “immune suppression,” “sleep disruption,” and “acute endothelial dysfunction.” To avoid this, he suggested, eat a meal that starts with a “small amount of nuts” and is then focused on roasted vegetables, legumes, and lean meats with, he specified, no skin. Finally, he admonished followers to “avoid alcohol entirely.”
Johnson’s argument was that “our culture around Thanksgiving is literally insane.” But one could be forgiven for thinking it’s Johnson who is crazy. His recommendation was to avoid celebratory traditions and comforts around food and drink in favor of rigorous bodily purification. Food was to be treated as fuel. And alcohol, frivolous toxin that it is, was to be shunned. You’ll have nuts and legumes to celebrate the greatness of America’s bounty, and not even a sip of wine. I don’t know if Johnson wears a health tracker, but if he does, I’m sure it’s always happy.
It’s only a little bit of a stretch to say that Johnson was arguing against the idea of Thanksgiving itself—a gathering of friends and family to partake in food and drink for the purpose not of optimizing one’s daily macros and testable biomarkers but of enjoying food, drink, and fellowship. In essence, he was arguing for the stringent avoidance of pleasure.
I don’t mean to pick on Johnson, and I wish him well in his body-optimization experiments. But a less extreme version of his hyper-ascetic, fanatically calibrated approach to health and diet has spread widely in the postpandemic years, even to those who aren’t trying to live forever. And it is most visible in considerable reductions in the consumption of alcohol.
In America and the rest of the world, drinking has dropped dramatically. Alcohol consumption in the U.K. has fallen to a record low, according to data published at the end of 2025. Teenagers are drinking far less than they used to. And last year, Gallup reported that the U.S. had the lowest rate of adult alcohol consumption in nearly 90 years, at just 54 percent. As a result, spirits companies large and small are closing production facilities as big producers sit on some of the largest stockpiles of liquor in history.
All of this has happened as the federal government has prepared new dietary guidelines with recommendations about what to eat and how much to drink. That effort, which began during the Biden administration and concluded recently under Donald Trump, was attended by an especially intense and fractious public quarrel over the government’s advice on alcohol.
Alcohol skeptics wanted to ratchet down the daily recommendations or perhaps even follow World Health Organization guidelines, which now state that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe” for health. Not surprisingly, spirits producers, as well as some members of Congress, disagreed. In the end, the new guidelines ditched entirely the previously recommended drink caps (two per day for men and one for women), but not in favor of universal abstention. Rather, they asserted that some people shouldn’t drink at all, and that others should “consume less alcohol for better health.”
As a cocktail enthusiast who writes a newsletter about bartending at home, I’m glad to see the guidelines move away from the one-size-fits-all drink-counting that has long defined health advice about alcohol. But the question now is what comes next. A narrow focus on optimizing for trackable, measurable physical health, like Johnson’s, ignores other goods in life, like physical pleasure and social connection. And the ongoing political and cultural debates around precisely how much to drink have tended to overshadow an important question: how to drink well.
This is a question I’ve been mulling since at least 2010, when I first found myself at a truly great cocktail bar, sipping miraculous combinations made from obscure ingredients. Each drink was like a little liquid magic trick, or a one-act play with a stirring story to tell.
At the time, I didn’t know the difference between a shake and a stir. I didn’t know what fat washing was, or why a bartender might want to use a centrifuge. I barely knew the difference between whiskey, rum, and gin, much less the complexities and intricacies of amaro, sherry, and vermouth. I’m not even sure I’d encountered the word amaro—a category of Italian-style bittersweet liqueurs. Cocktails were essentially a foreign language. But as soon as I had a good one, it was a language I became determined to learn how to speak.
I mastered the fundamentals of cocktail structure and started making drinks at home, first infrequently, then for increasingly large gatherings of friends. I installed a small home bar designed for creating cocktails. And eventually, during COVID-19, I started a newsletter intended to teach others how to understand cocktails and how to make better drinks themselves.
In my quest for better drinks at home, I have spent a lot of time thinking about ratios, ingredients, texture, temperature, and what cocktail nerds often refer to as balance—the subtle interplay between the forces of bitter, sweet, sour, and strong (or “booziness”) inside a drink. Which is to say I have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a cocktail good. But when preparing cocktails, I have never once thought about metabolic injury, oxidative stress, or endothelial dysfunction.
It’s not that I’m under the impression that alcohol has no associated health risks. And it certainly can be dangerous for those who struggle with addiction. Rather, it’s that focusing on optimizing trackable biomarkers to the near exclusion of all else misses the point of a cocktail, just as it misses the point of Thanksgiving. A cocktail isn’t a health-store supplement. It isn’t supposed to be good for you in the way of a carefully weighed blueberry protein smoothie. It’s just supposed to be wonderful.
To treat one’s body like a video game, in which the main goal is to keep grinding in order to boost your player character’s stats, is to miss out on that wonder and the pleasure corporality affords. And a good life has to include some amount of pleasure.
It’s ironic that this single-minded, “harm reduction”–to–total abstinence approach to drinking has come to the fore in the years since COVID. One of the clearest lessons of the pandemic was that it’s a mistake to overoptimize for health or disease prevention without considering broader effects. Public health experts and officials who backed the school closures, business restrictions, and other policies that we now refer to as lockdowns often meant well. But fundamentally, they were focused on stopping the spread of a virus at the expense of nearly all else. Since then, some prominent public health experts have recognized that those policies were myopic and caused unintended consequences: Crime spiked during the COVID years, for example, extended school closures resulted in significant learning loss, and, while it’s harder to prove, soft socialization skills seem to have declined as well.
The same goes for alcohol. In recent years, the surgeon general has warned not only about alcohol but about the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” It’s hard not to wonder if there’s a connection.
Alcohol is a liquid delight and a culinary accompaniment; it’s also a social lubricant. For thousands of years, alcohol has made it easier and more enjoyable to talk to and socialize with others—like, for example, your family at Thanksgiving dinner. Alcohol is obviously not necessary for having a good time with friends. And as some delightful recent innovations in the craft of nonalcoholic cocktails have shown, it’s not even always necessary for a great drink.
But at the margins, it’s not surprising that as alcohol consumption has declined, so has socializing. And socializing—time spent with friends, family, and loved ones—is a key component not only of mental health but of general life satisfaction and happiness. A more sober society is a less convivial society, and a less connected one. Alcohol has long been woven into our social fabric; it may not be an accident that as consumption has declined, that fabric has frayed.
To be clear, I am not recommending a return to the legendary drunkenness of America’s Founding Fathers in this 250th birthday year of our nation. And I certainly won’t say that better drinking will cure everything that ails society. But it might take the edge off.
Sociality—even booze-soaked sociality—is a measure of entrepreneurial vitality and economic dynamism. As a University of Maryland study found, when Prohibition kicked in, patents declined. Inventors had used bars and saloons as social spaces, neither home nor workplace, where they could bat around new ideas with a drink in hand. Prohibition shut down those informal spaces, and the loose-yet-productive brainstorming within them.
Meanwhile, a narrow focus on the potential harms of alcohol, without considering other factors like exercise and physical fitness, can also overlook important context. A 2025 study that examined cardiovascular fitness and alcohol consumption among more than 24,000 adults found that the mortality effects of drinking were smaller in people with higher levels of cardiovascular fitness, and that fitness was a more important factor than alcohol consumption.
My point, in the end, is not that everyone should drink. It’s that questions about alcohol consumption require thinking holistically about its broader effects on both individuals and society. This is what I mean by drinking well. Not drinking to excess. Not drinking just to drink. Not drinking cheap swill. But drinking for personal pleasure and meaningful social connection in a way that official dietary guidelines and daily stats from health-tracking wearables simply don’t capture.
The good news is that there are signs that even in drinking’s decline, some of this is already happening. The rise of cocktail culture since the turn of the century—what has often been called the cocktail renaissance—has demonstrated that there is more value in a thoughtfully crafted, precisely measured drink than in a generously poured one. The most innovative cocktail bars, which specialize not in heavy pours for regulars but in elaborate, culinarily inspired offerings that often feature a theatrical flair, remain wildly popular. A cocktail at a world-class bar like Silver Lyan in Washington, Double Chicken Please or Martiny’s in New York, or the Aviary in Chicago is truly a special event.
You can see this shift even in news of distillery closures. The most notable shutdown was the recently announced yearlong production pause at Jim Beam’s tentpole facility in Clermont, Kentucky. Beam is America’s largest bourbon producer, and its signature product is the familiar, modestly proofed, affordably priced White Label bourbon—which is exactly what younger drinkers are ditching. As a New York Times report on the Beam closure noted, “Polls show that not only are young consumers drinking less, but they are trading up as well, choosing high-proof, more expensive bottles to drink sparingly.” In other words, when they do drink, they are choosing to drink well.
You don’t have to score a hard-to-get reservation at a bar that charges $24 a cocktail to put this approach into action. You can apply it to simple drinks you make. Fresh juice, homemade syrups, and freezer-chilled glasses are inexpensive upgrades to homemade drinks. A pinch of salt (or homemade saline solution) makes a surprisingly large difference in a cocktail like the daiquiri. And well-chosen bottles, carefully measured and proportioned, can enhance even the simplest beverage.
Instead of slapping together a Negroni with equal parts Campari, a random gin, and cheap sweet vermouth from a dusty bottle that’s been sitting open on your bar cart for years—vermouth is, after all, a wine and shouldn’t be left out after opening—try a 4-3-3 (gin-vermouth-Campari) ratio with Ford’s gin, Cocchi di Torino sweet vermouth, and Campari. Serve it over a big block of clear ice with a fat strip of orange peel twisted over the top. Or brave the new world of very wet martinis with an equal-part split between Old Raj Blue Label, an overproof dry gin, and Cocchi Extra Dry vermouth, plus a single dash of orange bitters to tie it together. Stir it (sorry, James Bond) briskly over ice for longer than you think necessary, perhaps 20 or 30 seconds. Then strain it into a freezer-chilled martini glass and sip slowly while you consider how altering the gin-to-vermouth ratio changes the drink’s character and central relationship. A well-made cocktail, even a familiar one, is a revelation.
Drinking well has long been part of living well. The best drinks offer a combination of familiarity and surprise, comfort and cleverness. They blend bitter and sweet, sour and strong, salty and strange into something cohesive and harmonious and unique. Sometimes it’s OK to have crispy turkey skin at Thanksgiving, or a martini—perhaps even two.
Rather than focusing on counting drinks, try to make each drink count. In the end, it’s always about balance.
