Tim Etherington-Judge: from Zero to Hero

10/10/19 • 49 min

For this episode of the Real Podcast, we sat down with Tim Etherington-Judge, a man who needs no introduction if you’re in the world of spirits and cocktails. A former brand ambassador for a well-known whiskey label, Tim’s life was the stuff of dreams for many people. It was literally his job to fly around the world, go to bars and drink whiskey. Some kind of Instagram heaven, right?

Apparently not. As you might imagine, that kind of lifestyle is going to take its toll. As Tim explains with brutal honesty and openness in our interview, his mental health took a sudden nosedive and he ended up alone in a hotel room in a very dark place indeed.

However, through hard work and with a lot of support from his international friends network, he has come out on top. In the months following his breakdown, Tim realised that his sole purpose from here on in had to be helping others in the hospitality world to reach out when they need support. He set up an organisation called Healthy Hospo which offers people involved in the alcohol industry a way to improve their relationship with drink and turn towards a more rounded and healthy lifestyle.

But it’s far better if you hear it from him. We’ll be chatting about all that, as well as getting his thoughts on why the world’s best mixologists and bartenders are making sobriety far more sexy.

Get yourself comfy. We’re going in.

Get yourself comfy. We’re going in.

Previous Episode

Lucy Rocca on the success of Soberistas and the need for change

As we’re now well into Sober October, and with Dry January already on the horizon, this month's Real Podcast is bound to be focused on not drinking. Not that we're against alcohol, of course. Alcohol is not the problem. What fascinates us, and what we’re really keen to investigate over the coming episodes, is the way in which our society tends to dive neck first into what can only be described as an unthinking drinking culture.

As usual, we’ve been out to chat to people who we’ve met on the Real Kombucha journey – people who like to think a little differently and look at things through an alternative lens.

On the way through this month’s podcasts, we’ll be hearing a lot of personal stories, some of which are quite harrowing, but they all have a common outcome: positivity. The desire to make a positive change and to help others to do the same.

We’ll be talking to people who came of age in the hard-drinking nineties culture, as well as younger non-drinkers currently running some of the biggest sober curious Instagram accounts. We’ll also be talking to people who are hoping to make changes from inside the drinking industry. It’s going to be a fascinating month.

One person who has really gone to the heart of this and started opening people’s eyes to the peculiarity of our accepted drinking culture is Lucy Rocca. Lucy launched the incredibly helpful Soberistas platform after shaking off the shackles of a particularly fraught relationship with alcohol and realising that, like so many people, Alcoholics Anonymous wasn’t necessarily for her.

As of this moment, Soberistas have close to 11,000 Facebook followers, 60,000 registered members, and a website containing 54,000 articles relating to what people are calling the Sober Curious Movement.

I caught up with Lucy on a rickety phone line from Sheffield to discuss the sinister rise of Wine O’Clock, memories of Melanie Sykes and her Boddingtons Ice Cream van, and why it’s perhaps not a good idea to go drinking in theme parks.

Go on... have a listen.

Next Episode

Getting to know the Sober Girl Society - an interview with Millie Gooch

The statistics seem to be on a constant upward trend: young Millennials are turning away from alcohol in vast numbers. To an older generation, it sounds almost impossible. How can you not drink in your twenties? Isn't that what your twenties are for?

These ingrained ways of thinking, of course, are what fascinate us here on The Real Podcast. So this week, for our 12th episode, we sent Shani Higgs, one of the Real Kombucha team who recently gave up drinking for three months (you may have read her Sober Diaries on this blog), to meet Millie Gooch.

Millie is a writer and speaker, and the founder of Sober Girl Society (website here), an ever-growing collective of young women who are fed up with living a hangxiety-fuelled life, their weekends drowned out by beer fear, under constant pressure to succumb to Wine O'Clock. And when we say "an ever-growing collective", we mean it. The Sober Girl Society currently boasts close to 60,000 Instagram followers.

According to Millie, this new tribe is made up of young women, “People like me – busy lives, busy jobs, often working in media – who still wanted a social life but wanted to take alcohol out of the equation”. As our readers will know, this description is one that Shani has come to identify with wholeheartedly. So it made sense to give her the mic and get her talking.

In the following podcast you'll hear Millie and Shani discuss everything from the emergence of the Sober Girl Society, how the growing Sober Curious Movement relates to Cancel Culture and Callout Culture, how to navigate the pitfalls of sober dating, and what's involved in "coming out" as a non-drinker. They also discuss something called the "Pink Cloud" and "the Pink Cloud Dispersal Phase", which is a level of non-drinking science we've so far not discovered!

So, chatting to Millie Gooch about the rise of the Sober Girl Society over a glass of the finest non-alcoholic Prosecco alternative, here's Shani Higgs.