It’s increasingly easy to have non-alcoholic drinks at a bar and even to find a bar that serves only non-alcoholic drinks, such as Hekate’s Hearth, an alcohol-free bar and coffeehouse in New York City’s Alphabet Village.
“People don’t know they’re looking for a place like this,” said Katherine Maley, who is sober and offers tarot readings at Hekate’s Hearth. Sometimes people come in to work in the café during the day, Maley said, and stick around at night to discover that non-alcoholic imbibing can be refreshing and fun.
“It’s good to be able to taste what you’re drinking,” Maley noted, rather than just pounding them back. Hekate offers numerous non-alcoholic beers and specialty cocktails, including one that this reporter enjoyed: the Admiral Gilded, a refreshing, less toxic take on the brandy cordial.
Hekate’s variety is emblematic of an industry with many more attractive non-alcoholic choices than ever before.
“There’s so many good tasting options. Now, if you go to a half decent bar, they’ll have more than one option for you,” said Susie Goldspink, who studies no- and low-alcohol consumption trends at research consultancy IWSR in London.
“Everyone’s a lot more aware now of the damage alcohol is doing to you, and younger generations, in particular, are a lot more health focused. In those generations there’s a lot less stigma around not drinking alcohol,” Goldspink said, particularly in people up to 28 years old (Gen Z).
Non-alcoholic beers are the most developed market segment, Goldspink said, with increasing strength in non-alcoholic cocktails. Non-alcoholic wines and spirits are less developed, she added, although there is a strong push by wine producers to make such products.
This market seems likely to grow.
New Options
Non-alcoholic options for beer drinkers have expanded beyond grocery-store brands. Athletic Brewing, founded as a taproom in Stratford, Connecticut, in 2017 to provide non-alcoholic craft beer options, is one such premium purveyor. Today their products are available by mail, at retailers, and in bars and restaurants. All Athletic products have less than 0.5% alcohol by volume.
One of Athletic’s founders, a hedge fund trader named Bill Shufelt, decided not to drink for a month while training for an ultramarathon.
“Once he quit, he started sleeping better. He noticed all these amazing personal benefits to his health,” said Chris Furnari, Athletic’s Senior Communications Manager. The 30-day pause became a lifelong resolve to stop drinking. The only issue was that there were few enticing non-alcoholic craft beer options at the liquor store or on restaurant menus.
From that lack, Athletic was born and the company today sells non-alcoholic light beers, IPAs, and twists on cocktails like palomas.
While some Athletic consumers never drink alcohol, others drink less than they might have otherwise.
“Eighty percent of our customers still do drink alcohol,” Furnari said.
IWSR’s Goldspink estimates that 10%-15% of non-alcohol drinkers always abstain, with most people alternating between traditional drinks and low or no-alcohol options.
Cocktail enthusiasts previously found few exciting non-alcoholic options other than fruit juice spritzers.
John Wiseman, who founded the non-alcoholic cocktail company Curious Elixirs said, “I started tinkering in my kitchen trying to make fancy non-alcoholic drinks, because I had been a cocktail nerd for a dozen years.”
Wiseman decided to deeply curtail his drinking after a night in which he drank 20 drinks and did not have a hangover the next day.
“That was the scariest part. It was pretty wild” to realize how much tolerance to alcohol he had developed, Wiseman recalled. That was the seed for starting Curious Elixirs in 2015, a passion that intensified when Wiseman’s market research at the time revealed that 75 million American adults do not drink at all, and 90 million adults consume less than 2 drinks per week.
The company produces non-alcoholic versions of cocktail classics like a Negroni, an old fashioned, and a blood orange spritz, but also new blends of juices, bitters, and botanicals. These are available online and in restaurants and bars.
All Curious Elixirs products include modest doses of adaptogens and botanicals, herbal compounds thought to relieve stress. However, the definition of an adaptogen is vague and without adequate scientific evidence, making it impossible to determine what exactly makes a substance an adaptogen.
Wiseman issued a challenge on that front, calling for rigorous clinical research about whether and how adaptogens work to relieve stress and anxiety.
‘Mocktails’
Some representatives of sober living communities warn that drinking non-alcoholic cocktails could cause relapses.
Stephanie Steinman, PhD, a clinical psychologist at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin agreed. “Mocktails are a risky choice for people with alcohol and other substance use disorders. Some contain small amounts of alcohol and many mimic the look and taste of a real cocktail, therefore increasing the likelihood for a relapse," she said.
Wiseman, at Curious Elixirs, thinks this is a legitimate concern. But he stressed that his company’s products are different.
“None of our drinks are trying to mimic existing alcoholic drinks. They’re trying to be something new that has a dash of nostalgia to it,” Wiseman said.
At Hekate, Maley said that being close to products reminiscent of booze can backfire. It would have been a bad idea for them to go to a place like Hekate in the early days of sobriety, Maley said. After investing in therapy and learning to avoid triggers, today Maley has no concerns about working at Hekate.
Wiseman sums up a new way to think about non-alcoholic drinking. “Our approach is not to demonize alcohol. We want to have better options for everybody,” he said.
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