I'm a beer drinker, but I won't drink beer with normal alcohol content.  I'm a NA drinker, meaning non-alcoholic, which is a bit of a misnomer to start with.  All beer has some alcohol, but the label NA is reserved for those beers with less than .05 alcohol content.  That's one half of one percent, and that means that a 12 oz. bottle of NA beer should have .03 ounces of alcohol in it.  A regular beer would have much more, perhaps as much as .6 ounces of alcohol.  In other words, regardless of what kind of beer you drink, you're going to get less than an ounce of real alcohol from it.

The thing is, about six bottles of beer can get the average person fairly tipsy, and a twelve pack can get almost anyone fairly well drunk.  Just three beers might be enough to get you arrested for DUI in most states, depending on what blood alcohol level they use.  But with NA beer, it's practically impossible to drink enough to get even a little tipsy . . . and you surely can't drink enough of it to get drunk.

We had a local incident here in town where a cop arrested a guy for driving and drinking an O'Doul's NA beer.  The driver protested, claiming what he was doing was no more dangerous than driving and drinking a coke or Dr. Pepper, but the cop wasn't buying it.  The label said beer, it said .05 percent alcohol, and that was enough in his mind to constitute classification as an alcoholic beverage.  Even if the driver had explained to the cop that he would've had to have consumed at least ten of those O'Doul's to get down the same amount of alcohol that's in just one beer, it wouldn't have done much good.

So . . . if NA beer is just .05 percent alcohol does that mean it's safe for a recovering alcoholic (former drunk) to drink?  According to the experts, no, it isn't.  There's some evidence that just the smell of beer can cause a relapse with drunks, cause them to start drinking again.  But according to the best stats I could dig up, there's at least a fifty-fifty chance drinking it wouldn't bother a former drunk at all.  That's good enough odds for me, so I tried it . . . and got by with it.  And yes, I'm a former drunk, a recovering alcoholic.  As of January 4, 2008, I'll mark my 26th year of sobriety.

But have I taken a drink in the past 26 years?  That depends on who you ask, I suppose.  Have I taken a drink of anything containing alcohol with the intent of getting drunk?  No, not once.  Have I accidentally taken a drink, like by picking up the wrong glass?  Yeah, a few times, but all that happened was that I spit it out.  I'm around drinking a lot, so that's bound to happen from time to time.  And according to some tight-assed AA folks, when I drank my first bottle of O'Doul's, my sobrienty date went down the drain with it.  To that, I say, "Bullshit?"  It's a sobriety date, and I've damn sure been sober for 26 years.

Yeah, I drink NA beer sometimes, but I don't drink in every day or even every week or month.  Sometimes I'll stop off at the little liquor store near Campo Madrone and pick up a six pack.  I even celebrated once and drank three in a row.  No problem.  Just made me feel like I'd just downed three bottles of pop, that's all.  And . . . I love the taste of beer.

Does NA beer taste as good as regular beer?  I don't know because I can't remember what regular beer tastes like, but my beer drinking buddies say it's about the same.  I enjoy NA beer on occasions, especially when I get to a city where I can buy the fancy stuff . . . the foreign beer.  My favorite NA beer is Bitburger Drive, a German beer.  And I really Like Warsteiner Fresh, or Haake Beck, or St. Pauli NA, or even Buckler.  There's quite a few good import NA beers to choose from.

Back in the old days when I was still drinking half a case of regular beer a day (plus a half quart of Jack), I drank a lot of Budweiser and Coors.  I prefer the O'Doul's to the Coors NA, but I drink both.  At the hectic rate of NA drinking I'm at now, I might go through a six pack of O'Doul's in a week, or maybe in two weeks.  I might go months and not even think about drinking a beer.  And the questions on most beer drinker's minds has got to be - if you don't drink any more than that of it, then why bother?  That's a good question, but my best answer is - I just like a beer every now and then, and if NA is all I can have, that's sure fine with me. 

And do I ever wish I could drink the regular beer again?  No, not even a little bit.  I could give you a hundred reasons why not, but they only make real sense to me . . . and I'm the only one who needs to make sense of them.  My history with alcohol is enough to keep me away from it, but I guess you just had to be there to appreciate it, huh?

D. Paz, 12/28/07