How to Hide Your Beer – A How-To Guide for the Aspiring Alcoholic

 

Are you like me?  Are you tired of money?  How about self-esteem? Honesty?  Clean living? Is all of that stuff just a little too boring and blase for you?  Are you looking for a little excitement in your life? Something that gets your blood boiling, your heart beating too fast, and causes years of stress leading to an early death?  Do you want to despise morning daylight?  Drink Pedialyte to lesson the feeling of impending death?  Taste hops and barley with your cereal every single day around lunchtime when you finally get your sorry ass out of bed?

Well you’ve come to the right place, Champ (or Champess.)

Let’s get something out of the way before we start this how-to guide.  Your place in life, your marital or dating status, your friends, your job, who your live with, and even the place you live are all determining factors in how successful this will be.  In other words, if you are married with two kids and live in a three bedroom house with an acre of land, a garage, and a job you must attend daily by 8:00 a.m., you will read this much differently than a single twenty-two year old with a restaurant job and enough disposable income to keep a line item on the monthly budget for tattoos.

As you read this article, try not to feel overwhelmed if it all seems far too unattainable, though.  It can at first, but like anything else in this life that is worth having, your cherished goal of full blown alcoholism WILL take some effort on your part.

The key to all the advise you get with this article is creativity.  People that hide alcohol behind the milk in the fridge and think it’s “hiding” are going to get caught.  Somebody that gives a rat’s ass about them is going to ask if this is a different case of beer than the one they saw yesterday.  This example would be a dumb ass attempt to “hide” the fact that you desire to drink way too much.  That seems like a no-brainer to me, but I’ve seen worse.  Hell, in my early days, I DID worse.  So get those boring, pedestrian ideas out of your head NOW.  We don’t play with that crap about here.  Alcoholics must be creative with their bounty, like a pirate is when he’s hiding his gold.

The following are some well-researched ideas from a recovering addict I know pretty well (it’s me.)  Everything you read here actually happened.  Honestly, if all the ideas were here, it would be book length.  But you don’t need that much to get a good start on a successful alcoholic lifestyle. 

The fact that none of this was made up should probably tell you a couple of things.  First, when it’s put down on paper all stuffed into one article, it is really tough to downplay how fully twisted, encompassed, and marvelously insane a life can become when addiction becomes as necessary as food, water, and oxygen.  It’s beyond comprehension that marriages, jobs, mortgages, kids, and even lives can progress when fully embedded in an alcoholic lifestyle.  But that’s why this article is so important.  If alcoholism is your dream, the fact that you might NOT lose everything is good news. You need some help in getting there, and that’s what we’re going to accomplish today.

The second takeaway from this being a completely true article is that the creativeness of an alcoholic is remarkably impressive.  You don’t get married twice (neither ending in divorce,) keep one job for eight years and the current one for six if you aren’t an amazingly successful and creative hider of all things alcohol and tobacco based.  Yeah, you’re probably still going to get caught at some point.  That is just part of the lifestyle.  Don’t worry too much about that now.  We’ll just plan another how-to guide for another day on how to lie, manipulate, fool, exploit, dupe, and attempt to deceive nearly everyone in your life for so long and in so many elaborate ways that you, too, can come out on the other side twenty years later and not have a damn clue who you are.  

Are you getting excited for your future yet?

The ideas collected in this article mostly come from the past three or four years.  The addict we collected our data from (me) was widowed at 30 years old, leaving him a single father of a two year old.  He stayed single for the next six and a half years.  Those six and a half years did not present any challenge to an addict of his loftiness.  It’s really not hard to hide beer from a three or four year old little girl.  You can just put it in the fridge and call it “Daddy’s Juice.”

He was also a ridiculously sexy dipper during the entirety of his alcoholic days.  (He had to literally BEG the ladies to leave their panties on.)  With that addiction coinciding with the alcoholism, he also became quite good at hiding Kodiak cans and spit cups in strategically placed locations in the house.  When he remarried, this, too, had to be tightened up.

So here’s a few ideas from a masterful beer and dip ninja who managed to maintain daily usage of both vices for twenty years.  More impressively, however, he miraculously kept it up for three and a half increasingly stressful years of a marriage he finally has the freedom to no longer continue to ruin.

Part 1 – How to hide beer in the garage

This will, of course, depend on whether or not you have a garage, and what you keep in the garage, but keep this high on your list of possible hiding places if you’re married.  It will also depend on whether or not you use your garage for its intended purpose:  parking cars.  If your garage looks like a flea market full of worthless shit all came to rest on and around your Bowflex (which is now missing, along with every piece of furniture that was in your first house,) you really shouldn’t have much trouble finding a few thousand spots to hide some beer.  You might just have to deal with some mouse droppings and dead birds from time to time, but you’ll experience worse if you become a successful ninja alcoholic.  

Anyway, it starts with the places that she would never look because they’re icky or have no business being touched with manicured fingers.  (And yes, I know that is sexist.  I apologize.  It’s in the past.  Shut up.)  From there, you must look at places that are a challenge to get to, even if they’re right under (or over) her nose. Lastly, don’t forget that the garage opens up into the yard.  Who looks under hydrangea bushes, am I right?

Anyway, if we are to presume that you have already procured your beer, the next step is to get home and stash it.  Quickly.  Is wifey home?  Are you the first one home?  Is the babysitter there?  Are your roommates making out in the living room?  Did the kids flood the first floor again?  Did your insane girlfriend set up hidden cameras?  Again, these are different based on your personal situation, but you need to know all of these things before you get there so that your plan can go into action as soon as you arrive.  And this must happen every single day.  Every.  Single.  Day.

If the wife is home, you must complete one step before you ever actually hide the beer.  You MUST get it out of the car and into a temporary hiding place.  You just never know when you’re going to get home and wifey is like, “We’re going to Walmart.  I need hairspray.  I want to go now.  Your car is already warmed up.”

If that happens and you have not placed the beer in the temporary hiding spot, you need to be prepared for the wrath of Wifezilla.  It would be hard to envy your position in that argument, mainly because if you are hiding beer, it means she already has been on your for months or years about the fact that you drink too damn much.  Bitch.

Temporary hiding places can be something as simple as “the other side of the lawnmower.”  It’s chancy, yes, but when you have to work fast, it qualifies as “icky” and therefore can probably be used.  You can also put the beer under her car, behind your golf clubs, high up out of her reach but either in a bucket or hidden behind something, or you can take it to the backyard and put it behind a bush.  The key is to think fast and just pick something that there is less than a five percent chance she will use the rest of the day.  We can work with those odds.

Now, on to the semi-permanent, waiting-to-be-stuck-in-the-freezer hiding places (more on the freezer later.)  Aside from creativity, the thing to remember here is that beer doesn’t have to stay in its original packaging.  Sometimes hiding places are only good for one or two beers, and there’s no way in hell an aspiring alcoholic is only going to drink one or two.  In other words, if you are truly going to get good at this hiding thing, you need to get rid of the box and utilize several hiding spots per day.  Also keep in mind that garage hiding should be somewhat time-consuming to uncover.  Much the same as you don’t want her finding your beer, she does NOT want you to catch her snooping.  That means she can’t take too much time looking.  So without further ado, here’s a list of places to hide beer in the garage:

• If you keep a large plastic bin for old junk towels (because every garage needs old towels for various jobs,) it is quite easy to lift towels and place a few beers under layers of towels.  If the bin is large enough and they’re down far enough, it takes effort to find them, and that’s what you want.
• A deceptive idea is to keep several of those plastic “three drawer carts” stuck up on shelving or break them apart and have three, one-drawer bins.  The obvious hiding place here is to place them INSIDE the drawers, but that’s wrong.  You have to place them behind the entire bin, nestled up against the garage wall.  If she’s looking for your beer, she’ll open the drawer and not find any.  Then you’re golden.  It’ll still be right there behind the drawer, but she will not move the entire bin if she can easily just slide out a drawer.
• Lift the hood of your lawnmower.  Look for space.  There’s almost always some around the gas tank.  It’s a foolproof spot.  Manicured hands will not touch the engine compartment of a lawnmower.  Yep, more sexism.  I’m fully aware that women can mow grass and even ENJOY mowing grass.  We’re just giving advice here.  Never said it was nondiscriminatory.  Moving on.
• Got any old, scrap wood in the garage?  Stack it so that it makes a tunnel through the middle.  Trust me, it’s doable.  Slide the beer down the tunnel.  Voila.  She’ll never move that wood.
• Got kids?  Do they have car seats?  There is almost always space behind the fabric inserts of a car seat.  This works REALLY well for cans of dip.  The kids can even ride with a can pressing into their back if it’s forgotten and they won’t complain a bit.  There is often a gap under the car seat that can be used for beer, also.
• If you have a Honda Accord or another car that has a spare tire under a panel of removable carpet inside the trunk, remove that damn carpet and put the beer inside the tire.
• Speaking of tires, if a vehicle will not move after you get home, you can place individual beers behind each tire.  You can usually get two cans behind each tire, so that’s eight beers without much thought. And there is no way in hell she’s getting on her hands and knees and looking under your car.  (Yes, even MORE sexism.  These are the thoughts of an addict, ladies.  At least I recognize it.  Please don’t make me room with Cliff Huxtable.)

The key to all of this (and there are PLENTY more) is to be creative and think of all the places that take real effort to find.  Why?  Because she WILL have suspicions that you are drinking too much, no matter how good a pirate you are.  And she WILL go snooping.  The more insane and outlandish your hiding places, the better.

The last point on the idea of hiding beer in the garage is that nobody wants to drink hot beer.  This is why your MUST invest in an old refrigerator for your garage.  Then, after she goes to bed or she becomes enthralled in “Grey’s Anatomy,” you start stuffing that crap under the frozen meat in the freezer and find you a super important job to do in the garage while you wait for it to get cold.  Either that, or it becomes necessary to break out an old lunch cooler.  Why, you might ask?  Because you can use your lunch break to go fill it with beer.  And then you can grab some ice from work before you head home (because nobody wants to buy an entire bag of ice and use a third of it.)  Which brings us to…

Part 2 – How to Hide Beer in the House

The key here is the old, collapsible lunch cooler.  If you have one that doesn’t leak (also a key component of this,) you have a multitude of places you can hide it, and you don’t have to mess around with the freezer because your beer stays cold from the ice you got from work.

If you’re able to secure this setup, the outside of the house becomes pretty appealing because that cooler will slide under shrubs and porch steps and you can flip the wheelbarrow over and slide it under there.

But if you want to hide it inside, that’s okay, too.  If you’ve got a big enough Crock Pot, try that first. Nobody keeps the Crock Pot in an easy-to-see location.  Most likely it’s stuck back in the corner cabinet or on the floor of the pantry with seven rolls of paper towels stacked on top of it.  But the inside of the Crock Pot is pretty big and it is really easy to wipe out if you have a leaky cooler. So try that first. She’ll never look there. Well, unless she’s cooking in it.  That seems obvious.

The next place is again the corner cabinets in the kitchen.  The very back of the bottom shelf is impossible to see unless you get on your hands and knees.  Sounds like a good place to hide a cooler, am I right?  Why not stick it behind the air fryer you haven’t used since those French “fries” tasted more like pool noodles?  And do you know what will happen if your wife needs something from the bottom shelf of the corner cabinet? She will ask her fabulous husband to get it for her because she’s too lazy to do it herself.  (That’s sexist again, I know.  I’ll work on that as soon as the satire is over.)  And this is only experience talking; your wife may be different.  Doubtful, but certainly possible.

Other “Inside the House” hiding places:

• Lockable Furniture.  “I haven’t seen the key, honey.  I’ve never even put anything in the China cabinet.”
• Under a bed (but not necessarily your bed.)  It’s boring, but usually effective, especially if there is already stuff under there and you can slide the cooler all the way to the middle and put something in front of it.
• Inside a suitcase.  Everybody keeps them high up in the closet or in a storage room or coat closet that’s never used.
• Got any knee walls upstairs with those little tiny doors?  Can you get in there far enough to slide the cooler behind a stud?  If so, it would take some real effort to find it, which means that’s a good hiding spot.
• You get home, you see there’s clothes in the dryer but none in the washer.  You kindly go ahead and fold those clothes, which means the dryer is empty for the night.  That there is a good spot for your cooler as long as you announce that you have happily folded all the clothes in the dryer.  If not, it WILL be the night she opens it up to check to see if any clothes need folding.  This one is a little chancy, but it works if you know she’s pretty close to going to bed.
• Do you have one of those unnecessarily giant pots that you only use when you cook corn on the cob for your son’s baseball team, coaches and families included?  Those kinds of pots are either way low or way high in the cabinets.  Put the cooler inside it with the top on without too much worry.
• Anywhere up high in a closet.  It should preferably be hidden by sweaters or old WiFi router boxes or something that hasn’t been touched in months.
• Check to see if any tall furniture has a lip or ledge around the top.  If so, this means you could put something on top and not see it unless you back way up.  This works REALLY well for dip (or cigarettes, I guess.)  Unless it’s a really tall lip, your cooler probably can’t go there.
• While on the topic, another idea for dip (and there are literally hundreds because the can is so small) is to just nonchalantly place the can in the bowls she only uses for guacamole or chips or a cheese ball when company comes over.  Why would she need those bowls until then?  And they’re almost never super easy to reach, which is good.  Most likely they are on the top shelf of the cabinet and require a step stool to reach.  All good things.
• And again while on the topic of dip or pretty much any tobacco.  Any of these: cereal boxes, bags of chips she will not eat, toiletry bags, inside the back zipper of couch cushions, between mattress and box spring, in the pockets of hanging pants, between diapers, between your boxers, on top of the fridge near the back, under meat in the fridge, in the toe of shoes (even hers because she would never suspect that.)  There are literally thousands.

Part 3 – Disposal of cans and bottles.  Possibly the most important part.

To back up somewhat, we are presuming that you have time to get drunk every day and need this coaching.  It can be done, even if your wife (or husband, I guess) doesn’t go to bed super early. To get drunk every day, regardless of when they go to bed, they have to know and accept (even begrudgingly) that you need at least one beer every night.  You already call it your “release” or your “stress-killer” or whatever, and she already knows that.  The reason this is necessary is because once you have beer on your breath, the number of beers is incalculable. There is no proof of how much you’ve had to drink.

Unless, of course, you fail to dispose of the empties correctly.  If she finds the empties, it’s all the proof she needs to drag your ass to either counseling or AA.  And that is NOT what you want.  That’s why this is the most important skill.

The key here is to get them OUT of the house and into something small and secure.  It just has to be convenient enough to just grab them and go when you leave for work the next day.  If you decide to simply bag them up in a plastic grocery bag and tie the bag really tightly so that the contents don’t make a lot of noise, that’s perfectly fine.  Nothing wrong with that idea at all. (Proper and stealthy disposal is also the reason bottles are not a great idea. Glass beating together makes noise, and the only way to stop it is to wrap the bottles in paper towels.  And that just takes too much damn time.  Plus, you can crush cans on the driveway with very little if any noise heard inside.)

If there is already trash in the outside trashcan that you wheel to the road, you can also take that trash out, place your empties where the bag(s) was, and then replace the bag(s) on top of the empties.  It’s a desperate woman who goes through the trash looking for remnants of your alcoholism. If that’s happening, your days are numbered anyway.

Lastly, and this depends on your living situation, you can always use public trash, your neighbor’s trash can, the giant trash bin at a construction site (especially if there are houses being built around you,) or simply place the bag way up under your car so that it can’t be seen.  When you leave for work, you simply grab it and go. Once it’s away from the house, you’re pretty much free. You can just drive through any gas station or McDonald’s and use their outdoor trash cans. Easy peasy.

I think that’s all I have for today.  Best of luck with your beer hiding. Feel free to leave any ideas I haven’t included here in the comments below.  They probably won’t help me because I could probably write another twenty-five pages of ideas, but they might help the next aspiring alcoholic!!

**Profound, almost gratuitous sarcasm was used throughout this article.  If you did not get that, you probably do not need to read anything else I write.  Or you might be better off just getting off the internet altogether.