Thriving Alcohol-Free with Mocktail Mom

EP 79 Unlocking Mindful Drinking With Ian Andersen of Sunnyside

• Deb, Mocktail Mom • Season 1 • Episode 79

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I am thrilled to have as my latest guest, Ian Andersen, co-founder of Sunnyside which is the top alcohol moderation app available. Many people shy away from total sobriety, but still want help to cut back on drinking. Friends, Sunnyside is here to help! They aim to provide a supportive environment for those who want to reduce their alcohol intake without the pressure of total abstinence. In my conversation with Ian, he shares the founder story, exploring the journey of launching Sunnyside in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. We delve into the importance of mindful drinking and how modern approaches can redefine what it means to have a healthy relationship with alcohol.

Ian also opens up about his personal background, highlighting the impact of alcohol on his family and how it fueled his passion for developing Sunnyside. He also discusses the transformative power of the app in helping users track their alcohol consumption, engage with a supportive community, and access personalized coaching. Whether you're sober-curious or looking to cut back, Sunnyside offers an inclusive and non-judgmental approach to finding the right path for you. Tune in to learn more!

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Deb:

Buckle up, friends, and welcome to the Thriving Alcohol-Free Podcast. I'm your host, deb, otherwise known as Mocktail Mom, a retired wine drinker that finally got sick and tired of spinning on life's broken record called Detox to Retox. Let this podcast be an encouragement to you. If alcohol is maybe a form of self-care for you, where you find yourself dragging through the day waiting to pour another glass, I am excited to share with you the fun of discovering new things to drink when you aren't drinking and the joy of waking up each day without a hangover. It is an honor to serve as your sober, fun guide. So sit back and relax or keep doing whatever it is you're doing. This show is produced for you with love from the great state of Kentucky. Thanks so much for being here and big time cheers. Okay, hey, friends, it's Deb. Welcome back to Thriving Alcohol-Free with Mocktail Mom. I am so excited for today's podcast.

Deb:

Ian Anderson, one of the co-founders of Sunnyside, is here in the house to talk to us. I am really excited, ian, to hear your founder story of starting Sunnys ide. I cannot wait to hear kind of the backstory, how you came up with the name, all of it. What's it like to start an app and what is it like right now, running the number one alcohol moderation app? So for me I will just say like a little I don't know disclaimer, maybe I know there are many people, many of my listeners, who are like me, who have broken up, maybe tried to moderate. Didn't work. But there are many people I know who do moderate and who do listen and are maybe just wanting to drink less. So I wanted to have you on today to just hear about the app and what you guys have for the community, for those who are looking to maybe be more mindful in their drinking. So, thank you, welcome, welcome.

Ian:

Thanks, deb. I'm really excited to be here. I have been a fan of yours for a long time, so this feels appropriate and a little overdue, so it's very, very nice to be here. Thank you. So great to support all paths and I think that's key to us really opening up the mindful drinking moderation alcohol health journey to as many people as possible.

Deb:

That is wonderful. That is wonderful. Yep, and that was my goal in the beginning was like I just I wanted to just moderate, so interesting that I then ended up in your 15% there, so and yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so how on earth did you start Sunnyside? When did you start Sunnyside?

Ian:

In 2020. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, yeah.

Deb:

Really At the very beginning, like before it started.

Ian:

Yeah. So Nick Allen, my co founder, was in Mexico and was tinkering around with this idea. He wanted something that would help him track and plan his alcohol intake. That didn't feel like a sobriety app, because that's all he really found when he went online. So he was in Mexico City right before the pandemic started and he and I knew each other through work. We both worked in kind of the tech industry in the Bay Area and he knew that I had a family history with alcohol. We had also had drinks before together. So we both knew that we liked to kind of have sort of that social drinking interaction with our colleagues. So he called me up and started talking to me about this idea and that was the very, very starting point.

Deb:

Really.

Ian:

Yeah, I think it's key that he wasn't trying to find a sobriety app because, um, when he was, when he was in mexico with his wife, um, his story is that they found themselves kind of they were on vacation no kids, no, not many obligations but they found themselves kind of um, drinking a little bit too much wine every night, or at least to the point where it was kind of impacting their ability to enjoy mexico city, which is an incredible place, without the sort of fuzz of the the dailyover. So they he really set out to find build something that was focused on moderation.

Deb:

I love that, especially, like I know I know for many people in my community. You know traditional sober routes haven't worked, haven't been a fit, so it's so nice that there's other options available.

Ian:

Yes, and this this is kind of going off a little bit from the original founder story, but we've done a lot of research around this. One of the things that we see constantly in the feedback that we get when we're trying to put the word out about Sunnyside is people writing into the comments saying moderation is not possible. Or by talking about mindful drinking you're encouraging alcohol consumption, and I know that can be triggering to certain audiences and we absolutely respect that. But modern science does show that a combination of techniques can help people find a healthier relationship with alcohol. So a few of the data points there the NIAAA, which is one of the main sort of regulatory groups that figures out alcohol regulation and definitions. They actually changed their definition of recovery a couple years ago to remove the requirement of abstinence and instead they're starting to talk more about harm reduction. So they basically say if you implement harm reduction approaches and mindfulness approaches and are able to remove heavy drinking from your habits, you can be defined as recovered. Sunnyside isn't a recovery service, but we lean into that definition because harm reduction has been shown to be incredibly effective at helping people understand their why around alcohol and then by working on the sort of trauma, the whys, the triggers.

Ian:

Some people are able to develop a healthier relationship with alcohol without having the need to quit. We do want to recognize that there are people that are better fit for sort of the sobriety journey. But when you look at how many people drink alcohol in the United States, it's somewhere between, I I think, 60% and 75%, and 49% of them in several surveys have said that they want to cut back on drinking, but most of them don't do anything about it. Sunnyside is here to serve that population of people that know that they want to cut back, but they don't necessarily know what the outcome is going to be when it comes to cutting back. Maybe it's sobriety, Maybe they're going to reduce by 50%, Maybe they'll become, once a month, drinkers. They just know that alcohol is impacting their lives and they know that they want to take the first step. And that's really where we come in.

Deb:

That's so important. Yeah, it's so important and you don't even know. I think, just that curiosity, just somebody who's sober curious. You don't know until maybe you do start cutting back, you take a break or take a mindful drinking challenge or sober challenge, like I did, and so you don't know how you're going to feel. And then you start feeling better and it's like okay, maybe it's going from 10 drinks to two a week, or, in my case, seven bottles of wine to maybe one. That was kind of my goal, but just see how you feel. I think that sober curiosity, it's a great app to support that. Okay, so Nick's in Mexico and he's like, okay, we need to stop drinking as much. Okay, so your background, like your family history and stuff how does this impact you personally?

Ian:

Yeah, so the fact that Nick came to me with a sort of app that would help people with their alcohol journey to me was very, um, sort of serendipitous, because I had just come back from traveling and was not actually working full time. I knew that I wanted to start a company. I didn't really know what that company would be, but Nick came to me with this idea. I have a family that's been deeply impacted by alcohol. Um so when I was uh, young five years older, so both of my parents took to alcohol use pretty heavily my mom became a sort of closet drinker. She would literally lock herself in her room and and drink. My dad was a come home from work and drink a 12 pack drinker, and this was obviously very impactful on my twin brother and I. We had this twin support system that kept us mostly safe, but as the years progressed, both of their habits got worse. My mom got so bad that my dad had to leave the house and he went cold turkey sober using the support of AA. So obviously I'm deeply indebted and grateful for that path and he took us out of that home after a while. Two years after he took us out of the home, my mom passed away from liver failure due to alcoholism and I didn't really know her very well at that point and she was just it's sort of just become the thing that has defined her in my life.

Ian:

Then my dad has been sober for 30 years. He passed away unfortunately last year Not alcohol related, thank you but he is this sort of symbol in my life of the path that a sort of a healthy path when it comes to over drinking can kind of lead somebody. He went from over drinking he was in sort of alcohol use disorder level of drinking to changing those habits and really taking care of his family. It goes back deeper than that. Three of my grandparents died from alcohol related issues. One of my aunts, who was my mom's sister, was this close to dying from alcohol but she was able to pull herself back out of the depths of that through Alcoholics Anonymous as well and she's sort of a proud member of that community to this day and she's incredibly healthy now and is kind of a symbol to our family of sort of optimism and staying healthy.

Ian:

So my background deeply impacted by alcohol and I took this energy to Sunnyside and it really felt like the right thing to do. It's now to Sunnyside and it really felt like the right thing to do. It's now. I feel like my mission is to build Sunnyside out, along with Nick, whose parents are both recovering alcoholics of 30 years also gone through AA. So this is something that's really important to us and we're going to keep building Sunnyside on sort of the back of those sort of principles that drive us, and we want to become a big company that helps millions of people build a healthy relationship, but we're going to do it with integrity and a deep understanding of what people have actually been through on this journey.

Deb:

Boy, it's really meaningful to hear your story and to know that just what AA has done for people, what it did for your, what's done for your family, you know, because for so many years, right, that was the only thing that was available.

Ian:

Yeah, that was that was it.

Deb:

And so now like now, you're carrying on that legacy of recovery, whatever that looks like for people you know.

Ian:

I appreciate that, or feeling better, I should say right.

Ian:

Yeah, I have this sort of conflicting relationship with AA and I think there's two facets to it. One is that and I don't judge here like with AA at all I'm really happy that it's the most effective. It's probably how more people in the world than any other programming when it's come to alcohol health. But the thing that kind of bothered me a little bit is my dad, up until he passed away, called himself an alcoholic and it really defined his character and his internal identity and he had this deep sadness about 30 years ago and my brother and I had forgiven him 25 years ago, and so I think that people don't necessarily need to always define themselves an alcoholic. I'm not trying to create controversy there, but in my dad's case, I agree with you.

Deb:

I agree with you and it doesn't need to be baked in shame.

Ian:

Yeah, my dad carried shame with him until he passed away, and I just don't like that. He was much more than that. He was a great man that took care of his family and came out from the depths of that and I celebrated that. The other thing that I think is challenging sort of AA related is if I were to go walk down the street and ask anybody hey, if you wanted to cut back on your drinking, what would you do? I still think 90% of people would say, well, I'd go to AA, but I'm not an alcoholic, so I'm not going to go to AA, so therefore I'm not going to do anything.

Ian:

Okay, so what you're saying is that the only time that you would consider changing your relationship to alcohol is if you quote hit rock bottom and define yourself as an alcoholic. So it's not necessarily AA's fault that that's become the case, but that's sort of become the norm of how we look at alcohol health. It's obviously changing very fast. We're in a mega movement right now. It's the non-alcoholic beverages, it's the generational shifts, it's the sunny sides helping people realize that there's no shame in wanting to change your relationship to alcohol. But still most people I meet have no idea that there's something called mindful drinking or alcohol moderation, and that there's digital and non-digital tools that can help you.

Deb:

Okay. So I am exactly in that boat, because for many years and that's why I didn't take a break from my drinking for many years because it was like, well, I don't have a problem, I didn't have a rock bottom. I mean, my rock bottom was every morning, looking in the mirror and being like, oh, I feel awful, you have a hangover and it's a Tuesday and I'm putting my kids on the bus, you know. But I felt like, well, I don't, I don't identify as an alcoholic. I didn't identify as that. I didn't feel that. I didn't feel that way. You know, I just I just knew I was drinking way more than I ever intended to. Every evening or most days, I should say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's the.

Ian:

The non-starter for most people to make a change is they don't want to identify as an alcoholic, and you don't. It's categorically true that these days, you do not have to wait until you're ready to call yourself an alcoholic. You don't even have to have that label on your repertoire. What you need to know is that if you feel like alcohol is having a negative impact on your life whether it's small or medium or big it's however you define it there are tools like Sunnyside that you can go and download. It's anonymous, it's private, it's incredibly affordable.

Ian:

Yes, we have to charge, because we have a service that has costs and amazing coaches and amazing tools, but the cost of Sunnyside is less than the cost of two drinks. It's a month. So dip your toe in with Sunnyside. That's the way we like to think of it. We've made it as easy as possible for you. You don't need to know what your outcome is going to be. Just come and dip your toe in with us. We'll keep it anonymous, it's all digital and see if your life transforms by reevaluating how alcohol fits in your life, and for most people that join Sunnyside, that's the impact that it has.

Deb:

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Deb:

My personal favorite although I do love them all is the Sauvignon Blanc, coming in at only 100 calories for the entire bottle. And, not to be missed, the other members of their 0% family the Riesling, the Premium Red Blend, the Rosé, the Pinot Gris. With Giesen's 0% wines, there's a de-alcoholized wine for everyone and every occasion. Give Giesen a try and let me know how much you love it. And if you want to meet their winemaker, go back to episode 33 of the podcast, where Duncan Shuler joined me to share about the Giesen story. I mean, it's so transformational, whether you're just drinking less, you know, waking up, feeling a lot better, or like for me, not drinking, just choosing just feeling so good it's like okay, you know what, I'm good, you know I'm just like I had enough.

Deb:

But yeah, how wonderful to have a tool like that that is in you're holding your phone. I mean, if we're not asleep, right, our phones usually in our pretty much so basically you have the tool right there and I love. Okay, so you have coaches in inside the app. I love that it's anonymous. That's very reassuring for somebody who just wants to lean into curiosity. You know, just want to maybe check it out for themselves.

Ian:

Yeah, I can tell you a little bit about what's involved in the process. So we, if you go to sunnyside. co, you will fill out what we call like the quiz. It says take the quiz and we're going to ask you some information about yourselves. The reason we do this is to develop kind of a personalized plan From there. Once you get into the app, we encourage you to really focus on tracking your alcohol intake for the next 30 days or however long. You're starting to realize the benefit of that.

Ian:

Tracking is incredibly powerful to people. A lot of people think that it's so simple. Why can't I just do this in Excel spreadsheet or on paper? I would encourage you to do that. Actually, if that's easier for you, go for it.

Ian:

We're all about making change, however you need. But by tracking your drinks you'll understand, you'll gain a sense of when you're drinking, why you're drinking and how much you're drinking, and you'll start to just like build this perspective, even just in the background of your brain. And we see a lot of people write in and say that the act of tracking was transformational for me. I've, just by doing that, I've cut back my drinking by 30%. So that's the starting point. We make tracking really easy with text messages too, which is really fun, but we're doing that intentionally too. So we're actually working on a study that shows that text messages are incredibly effective at helping people cut back on their drinking, and in other studies it's been proven to help with smoking cessation incredibly effectively. So we use text messages not just because it's fun and anonymous, but because of the modality that it uses. It actually is incredibly effective. So track your drinks, and then what we like to say is that you come for the tracking but you stay for the community.

Deb:

I like that.

Ian:

We have this amazing community in the app, which is they're giving support on a daily basis and they're asking for support on a daily basis, and we have this way where we try to keep it really positive and optimistic and forward looking. And once you get involved in the community and start giving a little bit of advice, it becomes a really fulfilling cycle and giving advice and reading sort of the community interactions becomes part of your own mindful drinking journey. And we have coaches. The coaches are incredible. What I want to emphasize about this is A they're humans, even though a lot of people don't think they are.

Deb:

So you're actually connecting with a real person? It's not a real person.

Ian:

That's right Now. We will use some sort of first layer of pointing the message in the right direction.

Ian:

Sure sure sure we don't make it hard to access humans. If you say, hey, I need a little nudge. Right now I'm at a bar, my friends are pressuring me to drink, can you give me some advice? Those are the kind of things that people ask us about. They go a lot deeper, but in general because it's text message you're kind of like in the moment need some coaching. That's what our coaches are there for. It's a team of real humans on, I think, from 9am to 9pm Pacific.

Ian:

I could be getting that wrong. And what I want to emphasize also about the coaches is you don't have to use them, and I think this is kind of funny. I personally probably wouldn't use a coach too much because just the way that I deal with like tech apps and things like that. So I love the tracking and the community and the analytics, but for people that need that human interaction, it is right there for you at your fingertips. So the tracking, the analytics, the planning, the coaching and the community they really make up the full Sunnyside experience and it becomes this just daily habit that you do. That really helps you. Take a moment in the day to think about alcohol and then set it in the back of your mind and let sort of the system do its work, so you don't have to stress out about it.

Deb:

And how awesome to connect with other people who are also, you know, questioning their drinking or just, you know, looking at their drinking, kind of thinking about it, evaluating it, cutting back.

Ian:

Totally yeah, and we have people coming in for various health reasons. That's one of the questions that we ask up front. Are various health reasons? That's one of the questions that we ask up front. Are you coming in to improve your overall health, to lose weight, to cut back on binge drinking? We have these sort of categories that people are coming in on and then we're kind of surfacing the benefits of your cutting back in terms not just around alcohol reduction, but how much money you've saved, how many calories you've cut, how many nights of sleep that you've improved, so you can start to quantify the impact of less alcohol on all the various areas of your life. The research right now is showing that no amount of alcohol is healthy. Right, it's coming out everywhere you have. Canada changed their guidelines to one drink a week and now new studies are showing that the stories about red wine being healthy are categorically untrue.

Ian:

I'm going to butcher the details and then basically no amount of alcohol.

Deb:

Yes, I just know it's all changed.

Ian:

Yeah, that was a crazy sham If anybody just Googled that. I'm looking to it. But less alcohol is better than more alcohol, and what we really want people to understand is that even if you are drinking a bit much, and even maybe a lot more than you know that you should, cutting back just a little bit is going to help. You see pretty big benefits, and we really just want you to come and start that journey with us. And for a lot of people that join sunnyside, they haven't had a dry day, a no, no drinking day in a year, if not more, and so one of the first things we really kind of encourage them to do is work their way toward their first dry day and really understand the benefits of incredible sleep, less anxiety, more focus on friends and family, and then one dry day turns into more, and eventually they find a healthier pattern for themselves. So we're not here to vilify alcohol. We're here to encourage you to focus on a decrease in alcohol, because less is going to be more in this case.

Deb:

I love that Less, less is definitely more.

Ian:

Yeah, that's for sure.

Deb:

Okay, how did you come up with the name Sunnys ide Like? Do you like eggs Sunny s ide Up? What is?

Ian:

you know it's a. It's a good question. We used to be called Cutback Coach. I don't know if you remember that back in the day I think you had like an email address right Like that, I think, maybe or something.

Ian:

Oh, yes, you might still get emails from us from that domain. Cutback Coach is a really great name. It has some nice alliteration, but what we found early on is that it represented two things that people weren't sure if they wanted. They weren't sure if they wanted to coach and they weren't sure if they wanted to cut back. So we wanted to create a brand that felt like a destination with zero judgment. Sunnyside is the destination that you get to when you start to control your drinking habits and change the relationship to alcohol. You will feel better, you'll have brighter mornings and everything will kind of lighten up around you. So to us it really represents that destination and an incredibly inclusive approach to alcohol health.

Deb:

I love that. I love that. Yes, the destination I never knew it, but I felt authentic freedom when I really stopped drinking. It's really how I felt. It was just. I felt free, not having to think about it so much like I had, but it had taken up a lot of my space it had taken up a lot of my headspace had taken up a lot of room in my mind, so ridding myself of that was very good.

Ian:

I love that. I don't know if we're pressing on its time here, but I just wanted to share that In 2018, I took three months off of drinking and had this profound rebuilding of my relationship to alcohol, and I think, like a week in, I texted my brother and said I feel like I found a cheat code here which it's like kind of good and kind of bad. It's kind of bad that I was drinking more than I wanted to, to the point where I hadn't like experienced a full week of no drinking in a long time. But also like that was the start of my own mindful drinking journey, and I feel like it's completely changed since then.

Deb:

I mean, how now you can really relate to people who are coming in, who have, you know, not had a dry day in a long, long time, or you know to be able to relate to them, and to be able to relate in the sense of like you took what, what you felt like taking such a break.

Ian:

Yeah, I personally like taking breaks. I'm still I call myself practicing mindful drinker and I still take breaks throughout the year, just because I think it's like a nice reset. Well, I get like a nice health reset for myself.

Deb:

Absolutely.

Ian:

It's also just kind of the way my brain works, is constantly challenging myself. So, whether it's like fitness or other areas of health and wellness, that's great.

Deb:

That's great, okay. So tips for somebody maybe who's listening any like quick tips on, you know, if they're just maybe sober curious. They've just stumbled upon our podcast and, you know, maybe they haven't had a dry day in a long time. Obviously, download the app, okay, so they get 14 days. We're going to have a link, I think, for 14 days?

Ian:

Yeah, that'd be great. 15 days free.

Deb:

Try the app. So just try it. So okay, so we'll start there, all right, and then, beyond that, maybe what? What tips would you have for them?

Ian:

So I would say, if you're thinking about changing your relationship to alcohol, you should probably try changing your relationship to alcohol and don't put too much pressure on yourself. This is not about taking 30 days off, although that's always a fun way to do it or challenging way to do it. Try just signing up for something like Sunnyside. There's other services out there too. You should find the one that works for you and follow the program of tracking your drinks and then learning, educating yourself with resources and getting into the community. Don't think too much about what the destination is. Focus more on.

Ian:

In the moment, we see a lot of people signing up on Sundays and Mondays, and that's because a lot of people are coming off the weekend, possibly hungover, and we know that in that moment they're really just looking for a little bit of support, and so that's what we offer at Sunnyside. We will help you find that path toward less drinking and toward your ultimate goal. So if you're thinking about drinking less and it's maybe having a negative impact on your life, just dip your toe in the sunny side. The other thing I really want to emphasize is you don't have to pay money Like again, we're all about helping you make change. So, if you go to our blog, we have tracking templates, we have advice and tips and I think just starting to track your drink totals on a daily basis is a powerful way to understand triggers and, like I said before, but I also want to make a plug we just yesterday announced the release of our new free masterclass.

Deb:

Oh, I saw that yes.

Ian:

Awesome.

Deb:

Okay.

Ian:

Yeah. So our podcast host, mike Hardenbrook, who also wrote an incredible book that's on Amazon called no Willpower, required a neuroscience-based approach to changing your relationship to alcohol. He's now a Sunnyside employee. He's on our team, so he runs our podcast and he also launched this masterclass. He's amazing. He's talking to you on camera. It's 40 modules, it's at your own pace, 100% free. So while Sunnyside has already lowered the barriers to entry, we want the masterclass to lower those barriers even more, and we think that's a perfect place to start for anybody. It's not on our website yet, but if you go to our Instagram account, you'll find a link to it there.

Deb:

Awesome, okay, and your Instagram? I didn't. I don't think I even said that in the beginning. Your Instagram handle for everybody who's not following, please follow along is join sunny side, and that's on Instagram and Tik TOK Uh, so make sure you're following um. The sunny side journey to feeling better, feeling a lot better, drinking less, just being more mindful.

Ian:

Yeah, I mean one one little line that I like is like drink a bit less, feel a lot better is really what we're all about. So, yes, come join us if if you're thinking about changing your relationship to alcohol at all.

Deb:

That's awesome, ian. Thank you so much. Okay, so when you're not drinking, do you drink mocktails? Are you a mocktail guy? Are you a non-alcoholic beer guy? Non-alcoholic wine what do you reach for? What's in your refrigerator? Your non-alcoholic beverage?

Ian:

refrigerator? Great question. At Sunnyside we are NA nerds now. So when we had our first, when we had our first happy hour four years ago, there was like five of us. I think we all had real alcohol. These days I don't think anyone comes on a happy hour zoom call with alcohol because we're all exploring the NA options in our in our local area. I've been a big fan of athletic, however. I've been a big fan of Athletic. However, I've been branching out Just because it's good to see what else is out there. So BrewDog has been really tasty. I got some of theirs. They're more UK based, but they have breweries in the US as well. We also partnered with them over dry January and they made a limited edition Sunnyside NA beer, which was really fun.

Deb:

Oh, that's so cool.

Ian:

Yeah, I want to make that a permanent thing, but we had to work with them on that, I would say. Interestingly, my mocktail choice right now this is kind of dorky but is a zero calorie ginger ale that I found at the local grocery market.

Deb:

I thought you were going to say Shirley Temple and I was like, please don't say Shirley Temple. I drink. O'doul's and Shirley Temple Deb.

Ian:

Okay, so it's a, it's a sugar-free ginger, ale you said uh, yes, is it nixie?

Deb:

what is it?

Ian:

it's, it's cock in bowl. That that's the name of it and it's uh I I have seen it around um in the in california as well, so um very cool yeah, I like it because the flavor is really good zero calorie and it doesn't taste like fake sugar. But I of course Very cool, you got to rotate that's. That's like part of my repertoire, I believe, so it's so good.

Deb:

He has a sour right now. It's like blueberry strawberry in the sour. It's delicious and he has a double.

Ian:

IPA. Have you tried Best Day? Do you like the double IPAs? Yes, I have tried Best.

Deb:

Day. Yes, excellent, and I wasn't a beer girl, I wasn't drinking beer before, yeah, and now I, I really, really enjoy the non-alcoholic beers, especially in the summer. For whatever reason, it's like I enjoy them more in the summer.

Ian:

You know what? It's funny to me. I tried the NA Budweiser and I actually like I've never been a Budweiser drinker, it's like water, but I really liked it. And the reason is because it's such light, cheap beer that to make the NA version tastes exactly like the beer version, the alcohol version. But I find that the NA IPAs the flavor is just off. So I like the lighter beers. I think is where I'm kind of leaning in my NA Okay, okay, that's awesome, that's awesome.

Deb:

Okay, I'm so happy to meet you Screen to screen, really really. Thank you so much, ian, for coming in and sharing about Sunnyside, sharing your story, your backgrounds, really really meaningful. I appreciate your vulnerability to share that.

Ian:

Thank you.

Deb:

Yeah, really appreciate that. So, okay, everybody follow along Sunnyside on Instagram and TikTok. Join Sunnyside is the handle. Talk to you guys later. Have a great, great week.

Ian:

Thanks Jen.

Deb:

Big time cheers to you for tuning in to the Thriving Alcohol-Free Podcast. I hope you will take something from today's episode and make one small change that will help you to thrive and have fun in life without alcohol. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social, send up a flare or leave a rating and a review. I am cheering for you as you discover the world of non-alcoholic drinks and as you journey towards authentic freedom.