When I became pregnant with my son, I stopped drinking overnight. Like many people, I assumed I'd miss wine. In reality, I mostly missed having something I genuinely wanted to drink.
Again and again, I'd find myself holding sparkling water or a sugary soft drink simply because it felt polite to have something in my hand while everyone else was drinking.
It struck me that so many alcohol-free options felt like compromises. Either they were trying to imitate alcohol, or they were packed with sugar, or they simply weren't very exciting.
Becoming a parent has a funny way of making you more intentional about almost everything. You think more carefully about what you eat, how you sleep, where your time goes, and what you put into your body. Pregnancy was the start of that shift for me, but those habits didn't disappear once my son was born. If anything, breastfeeding reinforced them even further.
But I also wanted life to feel joyful.
I still wanted the little ritual of opening a cold drink after work, celebrating with friends, or sitting in the garden on a sunny evening. I wanted something that felt like a treat, not a compromise.
That curiosity eventually became COG.
At first, we simply wanted to create the drink we couldn't find ourselves: something genuinely delicious, low in sugar, and exciting enough to choose in its own right – not because it was replacing alcohol.
But the experience also made me think differently about alcohol-free choices more generally.
For a long time, choosing not to drink alcohol could mean having very little choice at all. You might have been offered water, a fizzy drink or an alcohol-free version of something alcoholic. The focus was often on what you weren't having, rather than what you actually wanted.
That's changing.
The growth in alcohol-free drinks means there is increasingly space for different kinds of choices – whether someone wants something familiar, something completely different, or simply a drink that makes an everyday occasion feel a little more special.
And I think that matters because our drinking choices are personal. People choose to drink less or not at all for all sorts of reasons and at different stages of their lives. For me, pregnancy prompted the change. For someone else, it might be curiosity, health, money, sleep, a challenge like Dry January®, or simply deciding they don't fancy drinking that day.
Whatever the reason, choosing not to drink shouldn't have to feel like missing out.
Looking back, I don't think stopping drinking simply changed what was in my glass. It changed how I thought about everyday rituals.
Today, I still love that moment of cracking open a cold drink. The difference is that it no longer feels like a compromise. It feels like a choice.
And I think that's one of the most exciting things about the growth of alcohol-free drinks. They're increasingly becoming things people choose because they genuinely enjoy them, rather than simply seeing them as second-best alternatives to alcohol.
