+Non Alcoholic Beverages: Short Term Trend or Paradigm Shift?

One positive outcome from the last few difficult years is our new focus on how much alcohol we are consuming. While the modern renaissance of slick cocktail bars from the last decade remains strong for happy hours and late night dates, some of us have come to the conclusion that our bodies just aren’t well suited to alcohol and its side effects. What is exciting about this conclusion is that the social spaces we inhabit are being demanded to provide honorable options for folks that have sophisticated taste but simply don’t want the booze.

When I stopped drinking a year and a half ago, we were at the beginning of the ‘end’ of Covid, the beginning of the height of beautifully packaged non alcoholic RTD’s (ready to drink; aka cocktails in a can) and newly developed spirits and liqueurs from around the world. Some of these products were beautiful examples of regional botanicals and intriguing flavor propositions, others were essentially water flavored to taste like booze.

Now that we are a bit removed from the hype of non-alc as a trend, some are finding their comfort levels with drinking alcohol again in moderation, others are just avoiding bars and late night socials all together. We can take a little bit more nuanced view of what we want to see (and don’t want to see) from cocktail bars and other spaces that offer non alc cocktails.

Often when I am out at respected cocktail bars and ask for a non alcoholic cocktail, I am offered a grapefruit juice + soda water + ginger syrup special. This is the initial reaction of a bartender trying to be ‘smart’ by giving the non drinker something that is harsh, tart, and spicy. Hate to break it to you, but this is not a good drink. For the vast world of chefs and bartenders out there that have had to cut out alcohol from their lives due to an excessive over-consumption (prevalent in the lifestyles of food and beverage professionals) our taste levels are still high, and drinking fancy lemonade is not really the vibe.

For those of us that have been lucky enough to explore the intricacies of flavor and terroir of such spirits and wines as Sotol, Raicilla, Aquavit, Italian Amaro, Natural Wines from all over the world such as Pet Nats, spicy Tempranillos, bright and bubbly Serbian acid driven wines etc., we still want to be wowed by a beverage, but that space is unfortunately empty and void too often for us.

When I was served my first fully non-alcoholic Negroni (my favorite cocktail) from Death & Co LA a year ago, I almost cried. While the approximation of non-alc vermouth, gin, and orange aperitif were not as bitter or complex as say, a Campari / Carpano Antica / Roku Gin combo, it was still satisfying and delicious- they took the same care of craft to chill the glass and offer top notch presentation as their guests who also ordered cocktails, just with ABV (alcohol by volume).

Looking into the future of the non-alcoholic space, what is really exciting is that our social spaces and the places that we go for beverages are starting to blend. Our favorite third wave morning coffee spaces are looking to the cocktail world for development on non-coffee menu programming by incorporating ingredients such as bitters, tonics, shrubs, and farm sourced syrups; as well as advanced techniques such as smoking, shaking methods, foams, etc. I am proposing a synergy between the delicious world of coffee culture that allows for continued sober conversation deep into the night by offering progressive ingredients such as adaptogens, nootropics, hemp based mood altering ingredients, and caffeine.

In bringing more ‘mixology’ to the world of baristas, we can also inversely solve the problem of boring ‘mocktails’ (a curse word to some who feel mocked by their inability to be respectable to sophisticated palates) by the barista’s toolkit into the cocktail bar. Ingredients that should be in both toolkits include natural, seasonal syrups (more variety is better for custom on the fly flavor) shrubs (the acid from vinegar is a lovely base) bitters, salts, vegan foam substitutions (aquafaba from a can of chickpeas - use for sour without the booze to kill the bacteria), as well as incorporating interesting non alcoholic botanical based spirits, wines, and liqueurs from around the world.

Basically the proposal is for the bartender and barista to use the opportunity to exceed expectations (that’s the definition of hospitality right?) for all the guests at the table, rather than make anyone ever feel like the exception. Instead they are welcomed and appreciated as important to the experience and night as everyone else. Within this goal, we flesh out the trend from the paradigm shift and settle into a world that is more rich with option and variety, for both those that consume alcohol and those that don’t, by offering delicious beverages that don’t contain alcohol, even folks that have already had a boozy beverage can continue the night with delicious flavor, while sobering up for the drive home.

In this method of thought, we take a completely inclusive approach toward non-alc, so that it really is for everyone - and can even offer adventurous flavor blending that we couldn’t accomplish with spirits or wine…that sounds like a delicious future to me.

By Jared Wierman,

Wholesale and Special Projects @ Pink House Alchemy

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