First place, second place, third place
In 1989, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg published The Great Good Place, a book that gave a name to something most people understood instinctively but had never articulated. He described three categories of place in a person's life: the home (first place), the workplace (second place), and the informal public gathering spaces where people come together voluntarily, without agenda, on neutral ground (third place).
Third places are the pubs, cafes, taverns, wine bars, tea houses, beer gardens, and neighbourhood locals where people show up, sit down, and talk. Oldenburg identified their defining characteristics: they are accessible, affordable, socially levelling, and anchored by conversation. Status matters less than presence. Regulars create a micro-culture. Newcomers can ease in simply by becoming familiar faces.
Oldenburg's observation was not nostalgic. It was structural. He argued that third places are the foundation of civic life, the soil from which community organisations, political movements, friendships, and even democracies grow. As he wrote, free assembly does not begin with formally organised associations. It begins in the informal gathering places where people first encounter each other across the barriers of social difference. The colonial tavern. The Viennese coffee house. The English pub. The French cafe. The German Biergarten. The Japanese izakaya.
The pattern is universal. In every civilisation, at every point in recorded history, shared drinking has served as a social technology for building human connection.
The disappearance
That infrastructure is now in serious decline.
In England and Wales, the number of pubs fell below 39,000 in 2024, the first time it dropped beneath that threshold in modern record-keeping. An average of 80 pubs close every month. The pressures are well documented: rising energy costs, increased staff wages, commercial rent inflation, and footfall that has never fully recovered since the pandemic.
But pub closures are a symptom, not just a cause. They reflect a broader retreat from in-person social life that predates the pandemic by decades. Robert Putnam documented the trend in Bowling Alone (2000), tracking the decline of community organisations, social clubs, and shared leisure activities across the United States. The American Survey Center has found that people living in communities with fewer third places report lower social trust, less political engagement, and a diminished sense of belonging.
The pattern repeats globally. In Japan, the traditional izakaya culture is fading as younger generations drink less and work longer hours. In Spain, researchers have begun mapping the unequal distribution of "drinking-and-eating-together-spaces" (DETS) across Madrid, analysing how their disappearance correlates with weakened community identity and social cohesion.
The causes are multiple and interconnected: smartphone culture, social media replacing in-person interaction, remote work eliminating the commute that once passed through neighbourhood commercial districts, dating apps replacing the bar as the default venue for meeting potential partners, urban planning that prioritises cars over walkable neighbourhoods, and rising costs that make casual socialising feel like an unaffordable luxury.
The overcorrection
Running alongside these structural shifts is a cultural narrative that has gained momentum over the past decade: the idea that all alcohol consumption is essentially equivalent, that any amount is harmful, and that the healthiest relationship with alcohol is complete abstinence.
This narrative has a basis in medical fact. Ethanol is a toxin. Regular heavy consumption damages the liver, the brain, the cardiovascular system, and virtually every other organ. Alcohol dependence destroys lives and families. None of this is disputed, and none of it should be minimised.
But the blanket equivalence, the idea that a single, considered glass of carefully crafted gin over dinner is medically and morally equivalent to a bottle of cheap industrial vodka consumed alone, is a distortion. And it has consequences that extend beyond individual health choices.
When a culture treats all drinking as equally bad, it loses the ability to distinguish between drinking and drunkenness. Between a social ritual and a solitary vice. Between a pub that serves as the living room of a community and a convenience store that sells the cheapest possible alcohol to the most vulnerable buyers.
The distinction matters, because the social function of drinking has never been about the ethanol. It has been about the gathering.
What shared drinking actually does
Anthropological and sociological research supports what most people know from experience: sharing a drink with someone is one of the fastest ways to move from stranger to acquaintance.
This is not because alcohol impairs judgement (though it can). It is because the ritual of drinking together creates a specific social context. It signals openness. It lowers the threshold for conversation. It provides a shared activity that requires no special skill, no prior relationship, and no formal structure. You simply sit, drink, and talk.
Oldenburg and his co-author Karen Christensen, writing in a UNESCO article published in 2025, observed that beverages have been central to third places throughout history. The general rule, they wrote, is that beverages become social sacraments. The majority of the world's third places have drawn their identity from what they served: ale houses, tea houses, wine bars, milk bars, Biergarten, gin palaces, cafes. The Czech kavarna, the German kaffeeklatsch, the French cafe all derive their names from the beverages at their centre.
The drink is the pretext. The connection is the product.
This is not an argument for intoxication. The type of drinking that builds community is moderate, social, and unhurried: a round at the pub after work, a bottle of wine shared over dinner with friends, a gin and tonic on a terrace while the evening cools. It is drinking as a social act, not as self-medication.
The isolation data
The decline of third places and shared social rituals coincides with an unprecedented rise in social isolation, particularly among younger generations.
Studies referenced by the American Survey Center and a 2024 investigation by The Atlantic describe what researchers have termed an "epidemic" of loneliness among young adults. Time spent with friends in person has declined sharply. The proportion of young people who report having no close friends has increased. Rates of anxiety and depression have risen in parallel.
It would be overly simplistic to blame this on reduced drinking. The causes are systemic: housing affordability pushing people into long commutes or remote locations, the collapse of walkable neighbourhood centres, the replacement of in-person socialising with screen-based interaction, economic precarity that makes a night out feel irresponsible.
But the loss of drinking-centred third places is part of the picture. When the pub closes, the community loses more than a business. It loses the neutral ground where a plumber and an accountant can sit at the same bar, where a new arrival in town can become a regular, where the lonely person who lives alone can spend an evening in the company of others without needing an invitation.
No app replicates this. Virtual third places, as researchers have noted, lack the sensory richness, the incidental encounters, and the low-stakes physical presence that make in-person gathering irreplaceable. You cannot bump into a stranger on a video call. You cannot become a regular in a group chat.
Quality over quantity: where craft spirits fit
If the cultural conversation about alcohol has become binary, split between excess and abstinence, then craft spirits occupy the overlooked middle ground.
The person who buys a 700ml bottle of carefully distilled, additive-free gin does not buy it to get drunk. They buy it because they care about what they consume. They serve it to guests. They pair it with good tonic and fresh garnish. They drink one or two considered serves over the course of an evening, slowly, attentively, and in the company of others.
This is drinking as ritual, not as escape. It is the oldest form of social drinking there is, and it is the form most compatible with health, community, and genuine human connection.
The craft spirits movement, at its best, supports and reinforces this behaviour. Higher quality encourages slower consumption. Greater cost per bottle discourages excess. Transparency about ingredients and process invites the kind of conscious engagement that is the opposite of mindless binge drinking.
A spirit made from traceable ingredients, distilled with care, rested for months, and bottled with nothing added is a product designed for attention. It asks you to notice what you are drinking. That attention naturally translates into moderation.
The argument we are not making
We are not arguing that drinking is good for your health. It is not. Ethanol is a toxin and no amount of craft distillation changes that biochemical reality.
We are not arguing that non-drinkers are wrong, anti-social, or responsible for societal decline. The decision not to drink is entirely valid and should be respected without qualification.
We are not arguing that alcohol is necessary for social connection. People have always gathered around tea, coffee, food, games, music, and shared work. All of these create community.
What we are arguing is this: the spaces where people drink together have historically served as some of the most effective community-building infrastructure human civilisation has ever produced. Those spaces are disappearing. The blanket vilification of all alcohol consumption, without distinguishing between a pub and an off-licence, between a shared bottle of wine and a solitary binge, between a craft spirit and an industrial one, accelerates that disappearance.
And when those spaces go, something irreplaceable goes with them.
A way forward
The answer is not more drinking. It is better drinking, in better places, with better company.
It means supporting the pubs, bars, and neighbourhood locals that still function as third places, not as nightclubs or party venues, but as community gathering points where conversation is the main activity.
It means recognising that not all spirits are created equal, and that a clean, additive-free spirit consumed mindfully in a social setting is a fundamentally different proposition from cheap industrial alcohol consumed in isolation.
It means building a culture of moderate, social, intentional consumption rather than swinging between excess and abstinence.
And it means acknowledging that the question of what we drink is inseparable from the question of how we live together.
Sanpatong Distillery crafts additive-free spirits designed for considered consumption: shared, savoured, and never rushed. Because how a spirit is made shapes how it is drunk, and how it is drunk shapes the evening around it.
