I acutely aware this week that I was not allowing myself to consume alcohol during this 30day life experiment.  I had expected that weekends with friends might be difficult but I hadn’t expected the impact of not having a casual after-work-beer.  Monday when I came home from work I immediately went to the beer fridge and then quickly stopped myself.  It was almost an automatic reaction to think, “Hey, I’m home from work, might as well have a beer.”  It’s not unusual for me to have a beer with dinner or while I’m on my computer blogging or surfing the internet.  It wasn’t until this week that I realized how much that behavior had become routine, almost like an involuntary reflex.

I live with two other young, urban, (and might I say studly) professionals and we usually take turns buying beer for the beer fridge (yes we have a separate fridge for beer) and the style of beer usually varies just to mix things because we all appreciate a good beer up: pale ale, IPA, black IPA, stout, brown ale, red ale, belgian, and the list goes on.  So suffice it to say that there is always something tasty in the fridge and I’ve become very used to having a beer after work.  With one roommate skiing in Europe at the moment and me not drinking beer this month, our beer fridge looks pretty lonely:

Three bottles of beer and a bottle of seltzer water. It's usually a little more elaborate than this.

Buying beer every week doesn’t take a huge toll on my budget because $10/week to have good beer in the house seems totally worth it.  It’s also not a huge source of calories if you’re not binge drinking it.  The average beer has around 200 calories and for an active male with high metabolism it certainly doesn’t impact my waistline to put down a beer every night.  That’s fine if you have one beer, but if you have 5 over the course of a Saturday night that’s already 1,000 liquid calories.  For those who are interested in counting beer calories I found a cool website (or rather, it was the first one that popped up on Google) that lists the calories in many common beers, http://www.beer100.com/beercalories.htm

The real issue for me however is not watching my figure, it’s going out on the town and buying beer for $6-8 a pop, it’s a real drain on my wallet and can get out of hand really fast.  I’m afraid to look at my mint.com account to see how much I really spend each week/month on alcohol and bars.  Getting a sixpack at the beer store is much more economical but it’s also a different experience to have a beer at home vs out in town watching a Bruins game with your friends.  They each have their place and time, it’s just that one costs about 6x more than the other.  Stay tuned for a future (depressing) blog post on what the liquid Boston night life does to my bank account.