If you’ve ducked your head into a Dan’s or even your local pub lately, you’d see a tonne of low ABV and non-alcoholic* drinks on the back bar. While the number and variety of non-alcoholic* options have increased in the past five years, non-alcoholic* cocktails are nothing new. Really, as long as there’ve been alcoholic cocktails, there have been non-alcoholic* alternatives.
In Jerry Thomas’ 1862 volume, The Bar-Tender’s Guide, you can thumb through a 15-long list of ‘temperance drinks’ (non-alcoholic cocktails) mostly consisting of fancy lemonades and sodas. Although some baulked at the idea – one writer for Scotland’s Courier and Argus wrote: “What! Are there not temperance drinks [enough], as it is?” We’ll have to agree to disagree – we can’t get enough.
Shortly after prohibition ended, the popularity of temperance drinks faded, and all the beautiful and intricate lemonades and sodas were replaced by new players (you may have heard of a little upstart called Coca-Cola?). The only non-alcoholic options available in bars from then on (until very recently) were premixed sodas (Coke, Sprite, Fanta) and “mocktails” consisting of one or two juices mixed together in a glass, often finished with a splash of grenadine.
Luckily for us, times have changed and today’s spread of spirit alternatives are just as complex, considered and creative as the hard stuff.
