With beer sales in decline, businesses are concocting booze-free drinks at nonalcoholic bars and in direct-to-consumer virgin cocktail kits.
At Getaway, a boozeless Brooklyn-based bar profiled by the BBC, clean cocktails look just like their boozy brethren — and carry similarly sobering $13 price tags.
Across the US, booze-free bars are becoming popular, and even normal bars are making money off of mocktails. Separately, startups like Kin offer craft cocktail kits that are “all bliss, no booze.”
These companies are unabashed about re-creating an alcoholic atmosphere: Kin manufactures the “buzz without the booze,” and Listen Bar replicates “rowdy vibes” with “drinks, not draaanks.”
The percentage of adult drinkers in the UK recently hit a 14-year low, and the number of people willing to pay big bucks for nonalcoholic cocktails is on the rise at high-end restaurants.
So some of these stylishly sober startups are less focused on sobriety’s health benefits… and more motivated by market opportunity.
“Nothing about our space says you should be sober, or you shouldn’t go around the corner to another bar and do a tequila shot after hanging out here,” Sam Thonis, the co-owner of Getaway, told the BBC.