canyonwalker | Entries tagged with drinking problem

Today I was thinking about about my progress/regress on my "drinking problem" and figured I'd post an update. Then I checked my blog and saw that the last time I wrote about it was just over 2 years ago. Wow, talk about things that haven't been front of mind for a while!

Note I quoted the term "drinking problem". That's because I'm using it ironically. My problem isn't that I drink too little; it's that I don't drink enough! 😅 ...Well, I don't drink enough compared to how much I like buy. "Really what you have is a shopping problem, not a drinking problem," one of my friends assured me several years ago. 🤣

So, how am I doing with my ~~drinking~~ shopping problem?

Wine: Years ago I set a target on my wine collection of 75 bottles ± 5. It was kind of like the dipstick for the car's oil: 70 was the "fill" line— meaning, time to buy more— and 80 was the "full" line— meaning, definitely don't add any past here. That was way down from the high of 120+ bottles my wine collection reached in 2011 when I self-diagnosed my drinking problem. I chose 75 as a target because allowed a good back-stock of the varieties of wine I enjoy drinking while balancing that with the rate at which I drank wine. Well, I've slowed down on drinking wine over the past few years. In turn I've reduced my target range. When I moved some bottles up from the cellar today I counted I'm currently at 55 bottles of wine. I think 55-60 is a good new target range until my tastes change again.

Beer: Over the past few years I've gotten more into drinking beer. It's a side effect of my Beer Tasting 2022 project— which, yes, it's still ongoing. Right now I have several six-packs worth across multiple brands and varieties. That's a lot compared to pre-2022, but my rates of buying and drinking are a) in harmony and b) not beyond "modest". Also, I keep most of the beer down in the cellar, so it's not like it's filling the fridge or cluttering the counter.

Hard liquor: If there's one area where I've let things get a bit out of control, it's the hard stuff. Again, "out of control" pertains to the shopping problem side of the issue. I've bought too much liquor thinking, "Oh, I'll enjoy trying that," and then it's spread out of my liquor cabinet and across too much of the kitchen counter. See the picture from our birthday party 6 weeks ago. ...And, yeah, it's got worse that night when 3 friends brought bottles as gifts. 😂

In the various retrospectives I wrote a month ago at the start of the year one I overlooked was my stash of booze.

Recall that years ago I diagnosed myself with a drinking problem— though not the one you may think. The problem is I don't drink enough! ...Well actually I do drink enough. The problem is really that while I enjoy drinking booze in moderate amounts I enjoy buying it in heavier amounts. If I don't carefully control my purchases my stashes of wine, beer, and liquor are prone to grow overfull, to the point that bottles and cans end up lined up on counters, and some older beverages go stale or spoil before I get around to enjoying them.

"Really what you have is a shopping problem, not a drinking problem," one of my friends assured me several years ago. Indeed, it's been by buying less more than drinking more that I've brought the two into balance. Though as anyone with a problem can tell you, maintaining balance takes constant effort.

So, how am I doing with my ~~drinking~~ shopping problem?

Wine: 70 Bottles ± 5

Wine is the biggest part of my alcohol collection. Several years back I set a target on its size. 75 bottles ± 5, I decided. While that may seem to the uninitiated like a lot of bottles, it was a calculation to give me enough to keep many varieties on hand and age them appropriately. It was a big step down from the 125 bottles I used to have. And even that isn't big for wine aficionados. Friends of mine who drink wine faster than I do have collections of 300+ bottles.

Across 2022 I actually held below my target of 75 as a midpoint. After maintain 75 ± 5 for a few years I actually did 70 ± 5 last year. I feel like I've still got a reasonable library with that slightly lower count so I'll look to continue at that level in 2023. As a data point I'm at 70 bottles right now (it was 71 until I opened a 2017 zinfandel with dinner 😋) and I'm not feeling the itch to buy more until I polish off a few more.

Beer: Reasonably in Check

When I did a check-in like this two years ago my beer stash was sprawling out across the kitchen counter. It wasn't a good look for someone who wants to have his ~~drinking~~ shopping problem under control. This past year I kept a reasonable lid on the total number of beers in my stash, even as I bought a lot of different beers for my Beer Tasting 2022 project. I kept the size of the collection in check by buying only a few varieties at a time. And I kept them from sprawling across the kitchen counter by storing them in the finished crawl space downstairs. 😅

Hard Liquor: A Little Overgrown

Hard liquor is the one part of my booze collection that has gotten away from me over the past year. My standard for hard liquor is that it's got to fit in the two shelves of cabinet space reserved for it, with an allowance for really tall bottles that I have to put on the counter below because they don't fit above. I mostly stuck to that plan during 2022, but then right at the end of the year I bought a few more bottles than I really should have. Now I have several on the counter.

How will I trim the hard liquor down to size? Well, first, I'll drink it! And I won't let myself go shopping for more until I drink a bunch first. 🥃🍸🍹

Second, I should just throw some out. ...Wait, what?! 🤯

I have at least 3 bottles of liquor I simply don't enjoy. Some of them were gifts that aren't my thing, some are things I decided to try and discovered I don't like. Most of them are cheap liquor so it doesn't hurt to throw them out— or at least it shouldn't. The problem there is I wrestle with the habit of frugality ingrained in me when I was young. I struggle with throwing stuff out, thinking, "Well, maaaybe I could enjoy it, sometime." At some point, though, I'm just going to say "Fuck it!" and pour it down the drain. ...And yes, I have done that before! See "Why is All the Rum Gone?"

It's time already for Round 8 in my Beer Tasting 2022 project. This round is a short one because there's only 1 beer.

"One beer?" you might ask. "What's the point of one beer?"

The answer is that I'm writing these as I buy & try beers, and I'm not drinking beer that fast. When I buy two six-packs at the store they last for two weeks or so. I've been stacking up leftovers from previous tasting rounds. This is an aspect of my drinking problem— I don't drink booze as fast as I want to buy it! (I admitted 5 years ago that this is really a shopping problem, not a drinking problem.) So on last weekend's shopping trip I bought only one new beer, Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy.

Leinenkugel Summer Shandy

Leinenkugel's is a brewery you may not have heard of if you live outside of Wisconsin, where it was founded in 1867. I encountered it for the first time because of Southwest Airlines, of all things, several years ago. They offered Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy seasonally as one of their in-flight beers. With the other (few) choices on the menu being Bud and Miller, I tried the Shandy.

It's been a few years since I've seen Leinenkugel's offered on Southwest, so when I saw it carried in my local Total Wine stores recently I put it on my list to try at home, at 38 feet above sea level, rather than at 38,000 feet.

A shandy is a style of beer similar to the German radler. In Germany a radler is generally 50/50 beer and lemonade or beer and a citrus-flavored soda. My sister learned this accidentally on a trip to Germany many years ago when restaurants offered her "lemonade" and she only found out days later she'd been drinking beer. In Germany, at least, radlers are lower alcohol; often around 2 - 2.5%. ABV. Leinenkugel's is different from the Euro style with 4.2% alcohol content.

So what is Leinenkugel's Summery Shandy? Or Leinie, as I affectionately call it? It's a summer wheat beer (weis beer in many Euro countries) with a healthy dash lemon juice in it. Though it has a clear taste of lemon, you wouldn't mistake it for a lemonade. It's clearly beer.

Summer Shandy is one of those "good at the right time" beers. I find the lemon flavor overpowering when I drink it solo. Perhaps it'd be great to drink sitting on the patio on a warm summer day... but we've had cool weather the past several weeks so I haven't been able to test that idea. The situation where this beer is good, suprisingly good, is with spicy-sweet-savory food. I had it with BBQ Buffalo wings one night this week, and it was amazing. Another night I made paneer tikka masala (an Indian dish), and it was good with that, too.

Overall, Summer Shandy isn't a beer I'm going to buy regularly. ...Except on Southwest Airlines, because almost anything is better than Bud and Miller. At home I'll buy it when the right opportunity rolls around, such as when I'm planning to barbecue chicken or expecting to sit outside enjoying hot weather.

2021 started nine days ago. While the new year means little more to me than the turning of a virtual calendar page, I use that turning as a calendar reminder to recheck and reassess all variety of things. This weekend: my drinking problem.

Recall that years ago I diagnosed myself with a drinking problem— though not the one you may think. The problem is I don't drink enough! While I definitely enjoy drinking booze I've learned that I enjoy buying it even more. If I don't carefully control my purchases my stashes of wine, beer, and liquor are prone to grow overfull; to the point that bottles and cans end up lined up on counters, and some older drinks spoil unconsumed.

"Really what you have is a shopping problem, not a drinking problem," one of my friends assured me a few years ago. Indeed, it's been by buying less more than drinking more that I've brought the two into balance. Though as anyone with a problem can tell you, maintaining balance takes constant effort.

Wine: 75 Bottles ± 5

I've gotten pretty good at balancing my wine buying with my wine drinking. I decided several years ago on 75 bottles as my target collection size. That number's based on consideration of how many varieties I like and want to have on hand, how deep a backlog of each variety I need for aging, how fast I tend to drink wine, and of course, how much space I deem reasonable to devote to storing it. Think of it like an oil dipstick where 70 bottles is the "fill" line and 80 is "full".

In 2020 I stayed mostly within that 70-80 range, as I did in 2019 as well. A few times I've dipped down into the 60s but I don't think I've gone above 80 for at least two years. That's an improvement from 2016-2017 when I was closer to 90 a lot of the time, and of course years before that when I topped out over 120. Step One was merely to acknowledge the problem; it took years after that to whittle down my collection.

The oil stick analogy works. Just yesterday I was shopping at a different Costco store than I usually visit. They have a wine department with more international choices than most others stores do. As I identified several bottles I'd consider buying I checked the app I track my wine collection on. I was down to 69 bottles. Yes, 🎵 69 bottles of wine on the wall, 69 bottles of wine! 🎵 I was comfortable buying 5 more bottles. Update: I missed one in my app. I only had 68. Well, now I have 73 so either way I'm good.

Beer: Pileup on the Counter

My drinking/shopping problem is a bit like a balloon. When I press in on one side, likely it expands on the other side. That's what's happened with beer in the past few months. I bought a few cases of Oktoberfest beers back in September because I wanted to try them. Then, on a roadtrip in October we visited a few breweries and I bought 44 bottles and cans:

Beer I bought at breweries in October 2020

Beer I bought at breweries in October 2020

Nearly three months later most of those are still sitting atop my kitchen counter. 😧 Oh, they're not taking up quite as much space; I stacked them neatly after spreading them out to make this picture. 😊 But the fact is 38 of these 44 bottles/cans from October remain. At least I've nearly cleared out my September purchases. And yesterday I successfully resisted buying more beer when I saw a tempting variety in stock at Costco.

Hard Liquor: Mostly in the Closet

Sometimes I look at my hard liquor collection and I'm like, "WTF?" For example, right now I have 13 bottles of tequila. I haven't had more than 1 or 2 tequila drinks in the past six months, why do I have so much? Oh, wait, that's why. 😅

For hard liquor I don't have a target number as I do with wine. My liquor standard is a matter of, "Does it fit in my liquor cabinet?" (We reserve a two-shelf cabinet in our kitchen for it.) Over the past year the answer has remained: Mostly Yes. It's "mostly" because there are two bottles I keep on the counter because they're too tall for the cabinet. But there's space in the cabinet now they'd fit in if they were shorter. That's a moral victory if not a technical one.

Part of the way I've kept my hard liquor habit in balance is by the discipline of "Buy one bottle after finishing another." The two don't have to be the same, though. Those 13 bottles of tequila accumulated while I explored vodka more this past year— including a drink I invented myself, the Quarantini, as well as sipping vodka straight over ice while imagining visiting Lake Tahoe— and made a point of finishing off some older bottles of rum that were already ½ gone or more. Perhaps in 2021 I'll do that to some of my 10 or so bottles of whiskey, some of which have been in the closet for 10 years at this point. And I'll replace them with... I dunno... more rum, maybe? Since I'm down to 5 bottles of that after having a dozen not too long ago.