Recent searches
Search options
With almost all 20-somethings I meet in California, I tend to assume that they don’t drink alcohol and I’m often right. Alcohol is as cool as tobacco here now. Not at all. No wonder bars are really struggling.
The only people I know here who are really into booze now are elderly millennials and Gen X and Boomers.
(I’m renting a place in Monterey, and everyone is sober)
I stopped drinking in 2022.
Sometimes I still have the practices of a person who came of age with booze.
I brought some NA beer and other NA drinks to festive things. The NA beer is fine, but otherwise time has really weaned me off the rituals of social alcohol and NA replacements.
It’s hard to find non-alcohol centered places where I live now (in SF). Even though drinking culture is way more intense in Singapore, there were at least plenty of late night outdoor food places where you can sit and drink a Milo or iced lime water while your friends drink beer. No such luck here.
When I’m in Monterey, I like going to the Fieldwork Brewery solely for the reason that they have not just one, but three very good NA beers in diff styles. And they have a outdoor patio with a fire pit. And there aren’t many other places to hang out in Monterey!
But on the whole, I don’t feel compelled to want to center alcohol in my life anymore. I do like the taste of shitty IPAs, the more bitter and bad the better, and the plethora of amazing IPAs (amazing to me, shitty to people who hate them) that are now nonalcoholic, more than scratches that itch for me.
Everything else: tea geekery has fully replaced my former whisky and gin geekery.
At Christmas I told a boomer acquaintance ‘did you know the best selling beer at Whole Foods is NA’ and he did not believe me ahahahaha
@skinnylatte milo dinosaur!
@skinnylatte I miss the 24/7 food availability and the salted plumb drink
@categulario yes me too
@skinnylatte huh, weird... if the trend is as strong as you say, where are our late-night coffeeshops and our non-alcohol-centered local music venues??
@scott young people also don’t go out anymore!
And as with all our problems, it’s a permitting problem first and foremost.
@skinnylatte the live music part, you mean?
(Coffeeshops closing earlier isn't a permitting problem... they don't need a different permit to close at 10pm than 2pm, as far as I know.)
@scott I dunno, the Center didn’t get permits for teas and had to shut down the tea thing
But also kinda feel like SF is dead re late night things anyway
@skinnylatte oh, was that why they switched to a self-serve model? Hmm. I wonder why they couldn't get permitted as a cafe. But any place legitimately doing business as a cafe could close at a later time without a new permit.
@scott they don’t have cafe permits. It was a problem with the hot water situation, I think.
@scott but they also seem too culty to want to do any actual permits lol
@skinnylatte it's too bad. Having a tea room open late was nice.
Generally when I talk to coffeeshop owners they cite staffing as the reason for reduced hours. Ritual on Valencia is open til 6pm, which is relatively late now. The sign says these are "temporary hours"...they used to be open til 7, and I guess still hope to return to that. Sometimes, I go by and find a one-off sign up saying they've closed early at 2 or 4 due to understaffing.
@skinnylatte anyway, just thinking out loud (you don't have to answer) as to why the zoomer dispreference for alcohol hasn't changed these economics at all.
@scott going out is hard for lots of age groups! I dunno, something really changed for me as well. I’m much more of a homebody.
I think the owner of Monk’s Kettle said as much in closing his Valencia spot, while attributing it solely to the ‘transcience’ of tech workers in the Mission. Probably partly true, but also just.. going out in general!
@skinnylatte It kind of makes intuitive sense. They have a million alcoholic beers and probably just a few non-alcoholic.
@skinnylatte I totally believe it. The Whole Foods near me has a sizable NA selection, with choices from several breweries, some like Athletic that do nothing else, and others like Industrial Arts that have a significant sideline in NA. Athletic must be doing particularly well; I saw an ad from them during the college football playoffs, usually the home of the macro beer brands.
@skinnylatte that's interesting, a majority of my friends in their 20s and 30s are really into craft beer and mixed drinks here in the southeast. I like a glass of wine with dinner at home but don't like drinking when I go out, mostly because I'm cheap 
(I'm GenX).
@Jennifer yeah this was true here.. 10 years ago. In the last few years it’s really died down
@skinnylatte it is *just now* that I realized NA probably meant non-alcoholic instead of north-americas.
@skinnylatte I hope the whole wine presentation thing goes away because of drinking not being seen as glamorous like the commercials said it was.
Fire pit in Monterey had me sold.
@Littlebobbytables it’s pretty nice and toasty.
@skinnylatte
not enough of a drinker to grok this stuff, me.
The IPA thing.
we used to drink beer. alc content was low (rel), came in pitchers, drink enough & you may well regret it.
Have had IPAs I really liked.
Very well received brewery opened up nearby (15min by bicycle), folks love it. Nice, bicycle friendly, famlies, dogs, kids, oldtimers, fire pits, etc.
had one of their IPAs that came in a small glass, w/tip, cost $10, & I poured it out.
I can't afford it.
who has all this $$?
@cpm where I come from, alcohol is $20-40 :) each!
I'm getting that.
Place also has a proper liquor license & gets lots of complimentary takes on their cocktails
I mean, on an appropriately hot day, I like a decent 'generous' G&T also.
A friend bought me one at that place. Was nice, I like mine better, but ok.
I returned the courtesy.
the bill rang my bell!
I took note the place doesn't run the tab on your coaster as I am used to, but rather, takes your card. Yikes!
I do cash, and tip well
I don't see how folks afford it
@skinnylatte
We (Ann Arbor, Mich) have a few coffee shops that are in Arab communities and they are hoppin until their 1AM close. Is there a similar ethnic pocket near you?
@wenge we have Yemeni coffee shops that open till 10 or so, but this coast is a sleepy coast
@skinnylatte
When I moved to the Bay from London about 30 years ago, I found it almost impossible to get a proper meal after 9pm. There was plenty of booze and fast food but little else. I seem to remember that, about 12 years ago, there were coffee shops on Valencia open until about 10pm and a few reasonably good places to get food. This seems to have changed more recently.
I now live in WA so I have no idea what's happening in the Bay anymore.
@godzero it’s worse now. Food spots close even earlier! The Valencia spots are.. probably no more. Staffing is hard, and service workers can’t live in the city anymore.
Oakland has way more late night food
@skinnylatte
It must be hard for those businesses. 
Back then, there was a Chinese restaurant in Oakland that stayed open until 2 or 3am. I can't remember its name and don't know if it still opens late, or even if it's there.
Are either of the Rudy's still open?
@godzero new gold medal is still around. Still open till 3
Rudy’s can’t fail closed but some former employees just reopened it
@skinnylatte
Not familiar with new gold medal but it's cool that it's open late
So sad about Rudy's! I often used to go to the Hollis St one at midnight (or more) when I was working on projects at American Steel. Good that it's reopened even though it's not late anymore.
@godzero new gold medal is the Oakland Chinatown late night place im thinking you’re talking about
@skinnylatte My anecdotal evidence is based on being in a terrace house with two student houses either side. They are much quieter in recent years than pre-Covid. Fewer parties, fewer late nights, more going out in gym clothes at 7am. Different students each year, but the trend is that they are less raucous.
That or we have been lucky for the last few years.
@skinnylatte It’s very similar here in Scotland too. And Scotland pretty much defined itself by its drinking culture. But lots of younger folk rarely drink, if ever.
@skinnylatte @skinnylatte I didn't start socializing (drinking) until very late in my age. In my country, it's the opposite, you start drinking very late from 1am to 5am (coffee shops close from 9 to 10 p.m) and alcohol and good wine is super cheap (4$ a bottle of whiskey i.e.) and with an alcohol culture that i's kind of a good thing. I used to be the weirdo with few friends, the literally 99% of my circle drank into near ethyl coma. Now I drink moderately and I'm fine with that. I think I wasted a little time going against the grain. There has to be room for everyone. Young people drink and smoke less now. But I don't know, life is short, and without some vice it's boring.
@skinnylatte I'm convinced that this is opening a space in the market for new kinds of spaces for socialising, which is really all bars are. e.g. Games cafes never used to be a thing. It could be wonderful.
@skinnylatte and yet in most places in the world beer is cheapest liquid, sometimes even cheaper than fucking bottled water. Not drinking is more expensive than being sober.
@skinnylatte I'm genx and most of my social circle aren't really drinking anymore either. We aren't necessarily completely dry but alcohol messes with so many things more as you age most of us just decided we like our sleep, our waistlines our blood sugar and our wallets better with much less or none of it.
@skinnylatte but also I can confirm my 20-something kids also are almost entirely sober and definitely have had whole college experiences that weren't alcohol-centric
@skinnylatte Welcome to #Monterey Growing up there our late night haunt was - Dennys. Or the beach watching ‘submarine races.’ It’s a pretty quiet spot. Sorry. Check out Wharf 2 if you want a sense of what it was like when my grandfather fished for sardines.
@skinnylatte
I don't know why anyone under the age of 70 smokes.
Smokers are just enriching billionaires and politicians (taxes), while committing suicide.
I've lost two sisters and a mother to lung cancer.
@skinnylatte I gave up alcohol a few years back
@skinnylatte how are bars even supposed to work here, when you have to drive to get anywhere? I moved to SFBA in ‘21 and have only had alcohol at home since then
it's interesting how generations shift.
my parent's generation had some seriously heavy drinkers. parties went through liters of hard booze.
most of my contemporaries that drink at all tend towards 1-2 nice cocktails or some wine.
@skinnylatte I haven’t had a drink since 2022. I gave it up to get better sleep. I am gen x and pretty much everybody around me drinks and can’t understand how I don’t. 
I don’t mind. I am not one to follow the masses. And I love my sleep