When the City That Never Sleeps Never Drinks.

A growing number of New Yorkers are cutting back their alcohol intake. But what’s there for them to do on a Friday night?

Like many other 20-somethings in New York City, on a Friday night, you’ll find Neya Kadambi getting ready to go out. That means glittery makeup, outfit planning, and dancing around the apartment with her friends. What that doesn’t mean — at least for Kadambi — is drinking.

Even as everyone around her nurses solo cups, the reactions she gets to that are normally tinged with jealousy. From strangers, it’s a “God, I wish I didn’t drink.” From her friends, it’s a confession that they don’t even like drinking on a night out. Some of them plan to have a little fun drinking legally once they turn 21 and then never drink again after that. That might sound counterintuitive, but if you’ve been drinking since you were 14 or 15, you might be sick of it by the time you can legally do it.

Kadambi chalks up some part of her sobriety to growing up with parents who didn’t drink. But even once around people who regularly did in college, she was turned off by the negative health consequences and safety concerns it presents. Frankly, she’d rather not be out of it on the streets of New York late at night, nor does she care for what it would do to her metabolism. “I find it weird that we have this culture where alcohol is so normalized,” she said. “Like, it is a drug.”

Her attitude isn’t as rare as one might think. Roughly 45% of drinking-age Gen Z have never had an alcoholic beverage, according to Nielsen IQ. Only 36% of Millennials have never had a drink, and that generation was already drinking less than those before it. Simply put, the younger you are, the more likely you are to not be drinking.

Still, this all means that over half of Gen Z is drinking, and a lot of them are drinking heavily. It’s hard to make a $3 billion industry go away, and per capita, American alcohol consumption has risen by 15% in the last 20 years. This doesn’t mean everyone who is drinking is happy about it, though. Even as the alcohol industry continues to thrive, its domination of nightlife is a growing frustration among young people. While going out for drinks is one of the most common first-date activities, over 75% of Hinge users say that it’s no longer their preferred choice.

Even when you’re just looking for somewhere to unwind after a long day of work and maybe see some from friends, bars are some of the few options for that. Restaurants can be pricey, parks are contingent on weather and time, and most public places, like museums or libraries, close in the early evening. So, how do you go out and not drink?

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That was the dilemma Sam Bail found herself in. In 2022, after over a year of COVID-induced lockdowns, Bail was looking for any way to get out of her house and see people. More often than not, that meant going to the local bars.

“Eventually I just realized, like, it’s a Monday night. I’ve had two tequila sodas. I don’t even want these. What am I doing?” Bail shares. When she tried to find other options, nothing turned up, a fact that seemed odd to her. The closest second was a coffee shop with late hours, but she often felt they lacked the community aspect of sitting at a bar. “It’s not that crazy to think that you can just hang out and not have alcoholic drinks, right?”

So Bail started Third Place Bar. The name is borrowed from sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who argued that places outside of the home and the workplace — so-called ‘third places’ — are essential to a well-functioning society. Third Place runs as a pop-up, hosting events like cocktail nights, comedy shows and mixology classes, all without alcohol, of course.

Though non-alcoholic, Third Place doesn’t want to be limited to just those who consider themselves sober. Be it high, hungover, an AA member, or just someone curious about drinking less, all are welcome. Bail only has one requirement for entry: “You have to be okay being in a sober space for a certain period of time. If you want to sneak liquor into your non-alcoholic cocktail, why not just go to a regular bar?”

You might be asking yourself a similar question here, too: Why not just go to a regular bar and order something like a tonic water or a glass of Coke?

Abby Ehmann, the owner of the East Village dry bar Hekate, has a concise answer for you: “If you’re not drinking, you might not want to go to a bar. And if you’re not drinking and you do go to bar, maybe you’re fucking tired of seltzer and cran.” Places like Hekate and Third Place are trying to fill a gap in New York’s nightlife space — serving up special, sophisticated beverages for people who aren’t drinking alcohol. But, what exactly are those?

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Well, a lot of things. A large part of the non-alcoholic (NA) beverage industry is made up of products that are meant to directly recreate alcoholic beverages, like an imitation tequila or a 0.0% alcohol beer. Here, many well-known alcohol brands are dipping their toes in the NA space. Heineken 0.0, their non-alcoholic beer option, accounts for roughly 7% of the brand’s net sales — and the NA beer market is only predicted to grow.

There’s also a subsection of these beverages where even though they are alcohol-free, they aren’t substance-free. This includes drinks with added CBD, THC and adaptogens. The growing legality and accessibility of alternative types of drugs, especially cannabis, is a clear factor in a lot of young people straying from alcohol. But adaptogenic drinks also call to a more health-conscious group, with brands like Kin Euphorics leaving you “skipping joyfully throughout your day” off damiana leaf or Immorel sparkling teas helping you “slow ur roll in today’s hellscape” with the relaxing powers of reishi mushroom. (Bear in mind the Food and Drug Administration endorses neither of these statements.)

But a lot of non-alcoholic spirits aren’t trying to imitate anything at all. That’s the case for Tilden, a non-alcoholic beverage brand specializing in bottled, ready-to-serve cocktails.

“As a former drinker, I was just kind of disappointed that non-alcoholic spirits never tasted the same,” says Vanessa Royle, one of the co-founders of Tilden. The problem was different at restaurants, where she mainly found sugary mocktails on menus. “For me, sugar was half the battle with a hangover. It kind of defeats the purpose of not drinking if I’m still having anxiety and headaches after a night out.”

So Tilden leans into flavor notes, something Royle notes seems to appeal to a younger generation. One variety, Lacewing, leans herbaceous, with notes of cucumber, lychee, and juniper berry. The other, Tandem, leans smokey, with notes of bitter orange, tart cherry, and cayenne. The older audience still tends to try and equate these to existing cocktails, with Royle often getting told Tandem reminds them of a bloody mary. She chalks that up to the color since there’s zero tomato in Tilden’s drink. “You just kind of have to let people have their own adventure with it.”

Non-alcoholic beverages are a new space for nearly everyone, so most have their own unique point of entry. For me, it was my parents — one of whom makes vodka infused with the plants he forages — deciding that they didn’t want to have a beer or glass of wine with dinner every night. For Nick Mechak, a former sommelier, it was oxymel. Originating from Greece, oxymel is a wine-like mixture of honey, vinegar and herbs, but it was described more succinctly in the tweet that introduced Mechak to it: “hipster bullshit.”

After quitting his job as a sommelier and quitting drinking altogether, Mechak was already turning the extra wine he had around into vinegar. Oxymel pushed him one step further, using it as the jumping-off point for Parentheses, the non-alcoholic beverage brand he founded with his partner, Tawny Lara. The vinegar base gives Parentheses a similar burn to alcohol, but the herbal, smokey, and floral flavors don’t call to mind any existing spirit.

One of Mechak’s joys when he was a sommelier was watching people enjoy a good food and drink pairing — the moment when you shut your eyes and melt into your chair and savor the taste. “Even if people are choosing not to drink, they still deserve to have something that is interesting, sophisticated, and compliments their food,” Mechak shares. So Parentheses aims to recreate that experience, with Mechak offering up pairings to complement each flavor. Pairing well with salty and fried food, the flavor Before would complement anyone’s favorite bar snacks — even though there’s no alcohol.

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All types of non-alcoholic beverages present a similar issue for buyers right now though, they’ve never tried them. Tasting notes or having a comparable spirit can make things easier, but still, it’s hard to spend $30 on something you might not like.

“Bottles can be prohibitively expensive if you’ve never tasted the stuff,” explains Ehmann, whose bar recently started selling bottles. Now customers can get a sample of or try a cocktail with the NA option they’re thinking of buying instead of going in blind. “You know what vodka is supposed to taste like, so you might taste a fake one and have it not be what you imagined.” But even if you like the taste, $30 isn’t cheap. There’s not even alcohol in them, so what makes them so expensive?

What that question ignores is that alcohol isn’t some expensive added ingredient, it’s just a by-product of fermentation. The reason alcohol costs as much as it does is the same as it is for non-alcoholic drinks: you’re paying for the development process, the kitchen space, the packaging. For Tawny Lara, author and co-owner of Parentheses, the question stems from a misunderstanding of the business process. “It goes to show how much we as a society value alcohol and not the labor that goes into making a quality drink.”

The world of non-alcoholic drinks might seem a little distant for the average person, which is something that Minus Moonshine, an NA bottle shop in Prospect Heights, understands. That’s part of the reason why the shop started hosting tastings most weekends. “I don’t think that sobriety or drinking less is something that should be exclusive, elevated, or ritzy. I think it’s something that a lot of people want to be a part of,” says owner Aqxyl Storms. The tastings also help spotlight local brands, as there are many non-alcoholic brands that were born in New York.

For Storms, part of getting into non-alcoholic spirits is being at the right place in your life to appreciate them. When they first heard of the NA brand Seedlip back in 2015, Storms didn’t see the point. Flash forward a few years, and now Storms is sober and an avid fan of pretty much everything they carry in the store.

There’s no set time to get into NA drinks though, as the crowd at Minus Moonshine demonstrates. It’s elderly people who don’t drink anymore, young couples with little kids at home and anyone who’s simply curious about the store. At Hekate, Ehmann notices a distinctly younger crowd, something that seems easy to chalk up to the East Village being a younger-leaning neighborhood. But no, Ehmann owns the alcoholic bar across the street too, and the crowd there is in their 50s to 60s.

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But just the other weekend, Kadambi confesses to having had to Google what a Heineken 0.0 was when she was out at the bar. Even once she figured it out, she didn’t end up ordering it. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just really don’t like anything that smells like alcohol.”

Maybe Kadambi is a bit of an outlier, having never drunk alcohol at all. Emma Savoia, a college student, will maybe have a cocktail with a nice dinner or a glass of champagne on a friend’s birthday but really has no interest in drinking beyond that. When asked if she has ever tried any non-alcoholic spirits: “I didn’t know there was such a thing, to be honest.”

Another non-drinking student, Mary Winer, can name a few of these brands. She mentions Ghia, a non-alcoholic aperitif brand that appears regularly in TikTok night routines and Brooklyn wine bars, and Liquid Death, a sparkling water brand whose cans are designed to look like a beer. Both are backed by millions of dollars in venture capital.

There’s clearly a real want for these products, but when an industry is expected to generate double its current revenue in the next ten years, all the investors pouring in might obscure what the actual demand is. This seems to be the case with the NA bottle shop Boisson, which announced quite suddenly in April that it was shuttering all its brick-and-mortar stores. This meant closing eight shops across four cities, five of which were in New York.

Just six months before the closure, the brand had received $5 million in investment from alcoholic beverage giant Pernod Ricard. Boisson still plans to continue its online retail business, but the storefront closures might reflect that consumers may not be quite ready for non-alcoholic drinks on this scale.

Mechak thinks Boisson’s closure might make investors shy for a while, but he sees an organic demand continuing to grow. Back at Third Place Bar, echoing Storms’ earlier sentiment, Bail is aware that there are still a lot of people who just aren’t in the place to embrace non-alcoholic drinks and spaces yet. “I think we’re playing the long game,” she explains. She likens it to the culture around smoking — you used to be able to smoke cigarettes on an airplane, and now you can’t even smoke within 20 feet of the entrances of some buildings. But it took over 40 years for us to get to that point. “We’re only just starting to realize we’re lacking places that don’t revolve around alcohol.”

Right now, about 80% of the people drinking NA beverages still drink alcohol. So at least for the moment, the question might not be how do we get people to stop drinking entirely, but how do we create spaces where people don’t feel the need to drink?

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Chris Marshall is the owner of Sans Bar in Austin, Texas, which to his knowledge was the first fully dry bar in the United States. He also runs Sans Bar Academy, a course for entrepreneurs in the sober space. Even as he hopes to see the NA space continue to expand, he thinks part of the cultural change can happen in existing wet bars. “A lot of bar owners think of people who aren’t drinking as an afterthought” he shares. “We need to take those customers seriously.”

People choosing NA options take them very seriously too. At Minus Moonshine, Storms confirms this. “There are times where I’m out and realize the place doesn’t have non-alcoholic options and I think ‘Why didn’t I bring a flask of non-alcoholic spirits I could mix with this seltzer?’” they remark. Lara echoes a similar sentiment. “Being able to crack open a non-alcoholic beer is kind of the reason I’m sober. There’s just no reason to go back to alcohol,” she shares.

When she attended school in the South, Winer drank a lot. She attributes this to there not being much else to do on a weekend except go to parties and get drunk. “I could never have shown up to a frat party sober. It would just have been horrible,” she explains. After transferring schools to New York, she virtually never drinks now that she has found herself with more options for what to do on a night out.

Winer feels that the reason she can enjoy a night out without alcohol is because she has a strong social circle — one that also happens to not drink a ton — and has found bars and clubs that play music she enjoys. But not every night out is with your best friends. What about going to happy hour with a new co-worker? Or even more dreaded, grabbing drinks on a first date?

The best way to overcome a reliance on liquid courage is to develop intrinsic courage, as Lara explains in her sober dating guide ‘Dry Humping.’ But you can be the most confident person in the world drinking a non-alcoholic drink and that still won’t change the fact you’re just sitting there talking to a stranger. “Obviously, having non-alcoholic drinks on a menu is great, but I also think that’s a band-aid solution,” she shares. Lara feels the future of dating might be experience-based, giving people activities to burn off their nervous energy.

Choosing to drink (or not drink) alcohol is a personal decision, one that ultimately doesn’t affect anyone around you. What these sober brands and businesses are hoping to do is make it feel like you actually have the choice to drink or not. Why not have a cocktail one night, a 0.0% beer the next, and then take a date to a pottery class over the weekend? When probed about what he wants from the future of the non-alcoholic beverage industry, Mechak has a simple response: “I just hope that it becomes a unnotable thing.”