I'll admit the living in a zendo bit cut down on my drinking even further... well, okay, it'd been about two years when we moved in, so maybe not so much? I sometimes like the taste of alcoholic drinks. In the right social setting, a single drink can be rather fun... but I find the effects irritating, especially if I'm going to be doing any training, which is at least daily for me. In my old lab, a lot of the lab culture was very pub centric, so I made a point of going out with them, but at that point I was training pretty much every evening, and it's not so much that I can't train with alcohol in my system as that I really don't like to. And spinning flying jump kicks... ugh. (But I don't even like teaching a beginning Chen class with alcohol in my system, though that was one of Darwin's extra special strong mint juleps.) Also, I don't sleep as well.

You may be on target with the hops. I tend to be pretty picky about smells anyway (if I had my druthers we would never burn incense in the zendo, but I concede the tradition) but hops had this heavy sweet-bitter smothering drowsiness about them. It was really too bad, because they grew much more readily than the grapes, and they looked lovely.