COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Dry Mill is a sober bar started by two central Ohioans who journeyed to sobriety together.
Sobriety can be a hard journey alone. When David Payne left the military, his life took a turn for the worse.
He missed the camaraderie and purpose the military gave him and alcohol became his crutch. Realizing the downward spiral he was on, he decided to lean on something else: friendship.
His best friend, Colin Thomas, had taken his journey to sobriety before him.
“I just felt really empty inside and so when I got out I found myself in a dark place, and to solve that problem, I turned to alcohol,” said Payne, co-owner of the Dry Mill.
Payne and Thomas have been best friends since they were 12-years-old. Both men are Columbus natives and have been navigating the journey to sobriety together for almost a decade. While their everyday life slowly began to change, they started to recognize a problem in Columbus’ bar scene.
“When we first got sober in our late 20s, we didn’t really have anywhere we could go where we felt like we could hang out,” said Thomas, co-owner of the Dry Mill.
The two started to conceptualize the idea behind the Dry Mill a few years ago, but it started to become a reality in 2020. The Dry Mill will be Columbus’s first sober bar, serving 40 pages of drinks and cocktails without the buzz.
“There’s a lot of things out there people don’t realize,” said Payne. “There’s whisky and gin and rum and vodka alternatives that don’t have any alcohol in them.”
Cocktail substitutes aren’t all the Dry Mill has to offer. In addition to drinks like the mango mule and cucumber mojito, there will be food and drinks that are simply juice concoctions.
“People can have it if they want it because the last thing we want to do is trigger somebody who doesn’t want to have that taste or that element to it,” said Thomas. “They’re not going to go into everything; you’re going to have the option on whether you want or you don’t.”
Trying to open a business in the middle of a pandemic has been no easy feat, but Thomas said that it’s been an amazing new chapter to his and Payne’s story.
“It’s been a long journey from 2012 to now,” said Thomas. “I don’t think it would happen if it wasn’t the both of us.”
The two best friends are using their journey to bring a unique and helpful experience to the Columbus community. The Dry Mill doesn’t have an opening date yet, but with over 15,000 likes on Facebook, central Ohioans are ready to get their non-alcoholic drink on.
“People who shared their stories of how they got sober and what they went through and what they experienced, it’s such a positive and humbling experience for both Colin and myself, we can’t wait to show them our final product,” said Payne.
