On any given night at Clavel, an award-winning cocktail bar in Baltimore, Maryland, there are eight or more non-alcoholic (NA) drinks on the menu. Made with house-fermented shrubs and other DIY ingredients, these are entirely new creations, not merely booze-free approximations of alcoholic drinks.
“When it comes to the development side of things, I find myself strongly favoring [NA drinks] that I can build from the ground up,” says Andre Levon, Clavel’s bar director. He has nothing against prefabricated zero-proof spirits that mimic alcoholic distillates, but says that “with the team that we have at Clavel, we can create a lot of new things.”
It’s one of several ways that bars and brands conceptualize and execute alcohol-free drinks. On the other side of the spectrum are NA dupes, a.k.a. beverages that aim to look, smell or taste like alcohol. These include smartly packaged cans of near-beer, 750-ml bottles of dealcoholized wine and zero-proof spirits or cocktails with clever names like Champignon Dreams or Phony Negroni.
But the audience for NA drinks, an industry now worth $13 billion globally, is diverse. And dupes are divisive: Some people are happy to sip a beverage that winks at its boozier brethren, but others find it unsettling to drink something that mirrors the very product they’re trying to avoid.
Are dupes valuable options for those with low- and no-alcohol lifestyles? Or does applying an alcoholic lens to everything that’s served in a can, bottle or glass diminish the whole point?
Different Reasons for and Definitions of Sobriety
“People are ordering non-alcoholic drinks for a multitude of reasons: religion, pregnancy, sobriety, whatever,” says L.P. O’Brien, the co-founder of wellness organization Focus on Health and the season one winner of Netflix’s Drink Masters. “In the same manner that we understand that individuals come to [bars and restaurants] to enjoy spirits for a wide range of reasons, we have to look at the other side of that conversation, and understand all the people who are coming in and choosing not to drink.”
Those who reach for NA beverages may not be strictly sober. Maybe they typically consume alcohol and swap in NA alternatives periodically—like when they’re taking a night off, gearing up for a long drive home or have to get up early the next morning. Industry analyst IWSR calls this cohort “substitutors,” and says they comprise 43% of the market for no- and low-alcohol drinks.
“Those are the people who are purchasing [dupes] out in bottle shops or in stores, or going to bars and restaurants and ordering them,” says Robert Bjorn Taylor, a beverage consultant in Austin, Texas. That’s in contrast to “a lot of people in recovery, [who] don’t drink anything that resembles an alcoholic beverage because it triggers them.”
Taylor, who will celebrate five years of sobriety in September, is perfectly comfortable sipping a Guinness 0.0 or similarly alcohol-inspired drink, but he recognizes that’s not the case for others who are pursuing their sobriety.
It’s a nuanced subsection of an already complex market. Sobriety is intensely personal, and how people relate to or define it varies. One person might call themselves weekday sober and have boozy drinks a few nights a week, while others live entirely alcohol-free lives.
