Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Spirit-free’ drinks gaining popularity
Here’s how to make complex, balanced zero-proof cocktails
A new era of moderation seems to be upon us, with people — especially you healthy, clean-living millennial types — drinking less overall and having lighter forms of booze when you do drink.
The current trend seems to be driven by factors as diverse as physical and mental health concerns, access to increasingly legal marijuana and the #MeToo movement’s bringing back to the fore old arguments about the role alcohol may play in abusive behavior.
New products are chasing this trend, some delicious, some atrocious. Meanwhile, bars catering to nondrinkers are popping up to welcome the sober and the “sober curious,” and the term “mocktail,” which detractors say suggests a lesser drink or a lesser drinker, has been replaced by “zero-proof,” “spirit-free” and the like.
For years, nondrinkers were the vegetarians of the bar world: neglected by menus, eye-rolled by servers, forced to settle for soda. The few nonalcoholic drinks available tended to taste as if they had been siphoned from a kindergarten juice pouch.
Today, while not every bar can be Existing Conditions, the cocktail lounge in New York that has put complex nonalcoholic cocktails up top on its menu, any bar (or host) worth their rim salt should have a go-to option, something better than a random tonic with a muddle of random fruit.
A hurdle the industry hasn’t fully surmounted is how to make a bar into a place that someone who’s not drinking still wants to go, says co-owner Dave Arnold, author of the James Beard award-winning cocktail book “Liquid Intelligence.” A bar that provides bespoke cocktails for drinkers and throws Diet Cokes at the sober isn’t doing that.
“The message we want to send is that you are as important to us if you don’t drink alcohol as if you do,” he said.
How do you make a good nonalcoholic drink? Here are some tips:
1. Get better with bitter.
This flavor acts as an appetite stimulant, so its presence may help a nonalcoholic cocktail play the role that traditional aperitifs do.
But it’s also a challenge. Aromatic cocktail bitters, one of the easiest means to add bitterness, are almost always alcoholic, but they’re used in such tiny portions that they can still be a good tool. Someone who’s not drinking because they’re driving may be fine with a few dashes, but someone avoiding alcohol completely will not, so if you use them, you’ll want to be sure the drinker approves.
2. Taste for texture.
The viscosity conferred by sugar or gomme syrup, the astringent qualities of the tannins in wines that can be echoed with teas and herbal concoctions, the froth of egg-white: All can help create a sort of trompe la bouche, reminding your palate of the textures and sensations of cocktails.
Arnold spoke of the tickle in the back of the throat that comes with some drinks. “It’s a product of fermentation, and that’s one of the things we replicate,” using plant extracts and teas to create a similar mouthfeel. Existing Conditions often uses glycerin for viscosity without a massive boost in sweetness and a combination of acids to create flavor reminiscent of Champagne.
3. Find a new hook.
Intensity may be the quality that I’ve found hardest to replicate in spirit-free drinks: the mouthfeel of a beverage that contains a spirit and makes people drink a cocktail differently. Drinks writer Camper English noted that he uses the word “slow” to talk about what makes good nonalcoholic drinks — “something bitter or spicy or weird that makes you sip rather than gulp.”
I think that’s right on, but I’ve found that “something” can also be a trapdoor: In trying to echo the heat of alcohol, it’s easy to overcompensate with an aggressive hook that skews a drink out of balance, making it too bitter, spicy or sour. Shrubs, drinking vinegars that evolved from old preservation techniques, are all over these days. Mix vinegar with fruit and sugar and you can get something delicious; you can also get something truly vile, in which the vinegar makes your eyes water before you even sip.
Drinks writer Kara Newman put it best, tweeting in response to my social media query, “Zero-proofs used to always be too sweet. Now so many are acid bombs… . Salad dressing in a glass, undrinkable.”
4. Don’t overthink it.
In my testing, I kept returning to the qualities that make a good “regular” cocktail. It’s not just what’s in the glass, but the entire experience, a mysterious brew of flavors and aesthetics and atmosphere.