Hello, my name is Kurt Robinson. I'm the founder of El Sentido, the first sober bar in Guadalajara – possibly the first in the entirety of Mexico. I'd like to tell you a bit about myself and how I started this project.
About me
I was among the first people to join Steem, getting on the platform before the first payout. You can see my account here @churdtzu
You can see posts there from some of my podcast projects. The last one was A Beautiful Thought in which I asked how we can be happy, how we can notice the things that are wonderful about our lives, and I asked my guests what they could learn from their challenging experiences.
History of sober bars
A few years ago I was researching history. Many of you might be familiar with the ideas of the great mudflood or the Tartarian hypothesis. I don't have any strong opinions about those ideas, but I did discover many interesting things while reading that history.
One interesting thing that came up was about the temperance movement. About 150 years ago, many people in the English-speaking world started to see how much damage alcohol was doing in their lives and to their societies. Many of them decided to renounce the consumption of spirits, and later decided to give up the consumption of alcohol in its entirety.
They founded many businesses, temperance bars and coffee palaces. Temperance bars were establishments for social activity that didn't serve any alcohol. There is one bar that still exists from this period, Mr. Fitzpatrick's in Rawtenstall, England. They still serve the same health-promoting herbal tonics and sodas.
Coffee palaces were hotels in Australia which served no alcohol. Some of them quite large, with more than 500 rooms.
Eventually most of these businesses ceased, and people seemed to forget about the temperance movement. Nowadays, people are thinking more and more about health. It's easy to access information about the problems with alcohol, and with a little nudge, people can easily observe the problems for themselves.
So I started to wonder, if temperance bars existed once, then could they exist again?
I'll explain more about my thinking process in future posts, about the books I read and how I came up with the name for the bar. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you soon here in Guadalajara.