On Drinking: The Sachs-Meehan Plan for Sustainable Drinking

Travel/Booze/Other Things writer Adam Sachs took several rounds for the team, and quite happily. In his piece for the April GQ Sachs documents a reasonably epic night out on the town with PDT's Jim Meehan, in an effort to take a few pages from the Meehan playbook on how to maintain while drinking quite a lot over a lengthy evening with various unscheduled stops. (The piece isn't online at GQ but you can check it out at Sachs' site here: or, and I'd advise this, pick up an actual copy of the magazine. Sachs walks you through one night out with Meehan, with many locations and many more drinks. Along the way Meehan lends the benefit of his considerable savvy on How To Do It Right. There are so many really important texts on not getting, for lack of a better term, too drunk. Kingsely Amis is the master in this, as in all matters relating to the proper attitude and approach towards drinking, as well as towards excess. David A. Embury, the businessman/avid drinker-turned-bar-scribe (and the inspiration for our name), may have the most foolproof bit of advice for how not to go to the Dark Side that I've ever heard (and I paraphrase): if  you think you will be fine after the next drink, but you cannot be certain that you will be fine after two more, stop. Meehan's counsel to punctuate every drink with a glass of water is much easier to adhere to (rehydrates, and helps you keep conscious track of how many you've had, advantageous to those of us who occasioanally slip into Cookie Monster drinking mode). But it's all a rich tapestry of well-researched and thoroughly vetted personal strategies and is, in fact, a life's work that never ends for those who really throw themselves into their drinking. As Amis wrote (and as quoted in Sachs' piece) "If you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be."

Adam Sachs
PDT
GQ