Matt and Louis Catizone of St. Agrestis

Every season, Ashley Santoro, beverage director at Golden Age Hospitality, opens new bottles, stirs and shakes unexpected pairings and incorporates seasonal produce into the cocktail program at the group’s bars including The Nines in NoHo, Le Dive on the Lower East Side and the soon-to-open Deux Chats in Williamsburg.

These days not everything Santoro experiments with contains alcohol, though.

“We put so much seasonal focus on our spirit cocktails, but we almost excluded an entire group,” she said.

That group is the “sober curious,” guests who are cutting back on alcohol as they train for athletic endeavors, respond to a health condition or simply choose to imbibe less.

With alcohol-free drinks, producers, retailers and bars are finding an untapped revenue stream, especially because the lighter drinkers tend to be both adventurous and loyal, seeking out interesting concoctions and then buying them repeatedly. Nonalcoholic drink-makers, unencumbered by the country’s variable liquor laws, are free to ship direct-to-consumer orders around the country and quickly scale brick-and-mortar retailers. Meanwhile, the city’s restaurants and bars are reaping the benefits from guests who might otherwise have sipped only tap water.

“We wanted to create something layered and complex for them,” Santoro said. “There are only so many sparkling waters and iced teas you can do.” Santoro avoids rich, syrupy drinks in favor of more complex, sophisticated cocktails, she says. The summer menu at The Nines features the Eastern Sunrise, which has pineapple, yuzu, thyme, lemon and soda. A strawberry soda is popular at Le Dive.

Nonalcoholic spirits do not have a firm definition. They usually are non-juice-based drinks, often infused or extracted in a similar fashion to alcoholic relatives. In 2020 Americans downed an extra drink per day on average, but as people emerged from their home, some sought a more moderate approach to alcohol consumption, leaders in the growing zero-proof spirits industry say.  

The rise of alcohol-free drinking predates the Covid-19 pandemic. But beginning around New Year’s Eve in 2020, weekly demand for nonalcoholic beverages on Amazon jumped, and they stayed elevated throughout last year, according to an analysis by online business accelerator Pattern.

The expanding market is expected to be a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide by 2025, according to market research firm Grand View Research. It is still dwarfed by $1.5 trillion in global alcohol sales.

Nicholas Bodkins noticed the trends early last year. He and his wife had cut back on drinking as they considered having a baby, and he went on the hunt for a guide to help him navigate some non-booze options. 

In January he and co-founder Barrie Arnold signed a lease with a landlord in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where Bodkins lives. He opened Boisson, a nonalcoholic spirits store, Feb. 27 in a 450-square-foot space on Court Street using around $50,000 of his own money.

Boisson was an immediate success. Customers came in from the wine store across the street to grab something for their teetotalist friends or to buy mixers such as shrubs and sodas that liquor stores in New York can’t sell.

“All we are doing is changing ingredients of the ritual,” Bodkins said. “The ritual is the fireplace, the rooftop dinner, the cooler at the beach.” He said more than 90% of his customers drink.

A year and a half after opening, Boisson has five stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. It fulfills same-day orders in many residential neighborhoods in the two boroughs. It opened a warehouse in Industry City in September to meet the rising demand for e-commerce sales, which account for almost half the business.

Sales of its 450 items are brisk, Bodkins said, adding that he expects to break $10 million in revenue by the end of the year as he expands around the country, beginning with three Los Angeles locations.

Growth at such speed would be impossible if he sold liquor, since each business in New York is required to obtain a separate license for each store. A liquor license typically takes up to six months to be approved.

Boisson isn’t the only business of its ilk. Spirited Away in SoHo and Minus Moonshine in Prospect Heights are two others in the city.

The quick ramp-up of the sector reflects the relative ease of finding appropriate space, said Matthew Fogel, who, alongside agent Albert Halawani, works with Bodkins.

“It’s an extremely desirable use for ownership,” Fogel said. “No licensing. No certain square footage from a school.”

E-commerce took off during 2020 and has been a major driver in making nonalcoholic spirits available to a wide audience. Shipping zero-proof bottles around the country is simple, since there are no state-by-state liquor regulations to contend with.

“It’s a packaged consumer good,” Matt Catizone said of his Phony Negroni. Catizone is a co-owner of St. Agrestis, which bottles both spirits, premixed cocktails and the nonalcoholic negroni, which was released in January. 

Catizone declined to share details on revenue, but he said there’s enough demand and capacity to grow Phony Negroni sales quickly outside of the city at restaurants and retailers and through online orders.

Melanie Masarin, founder of Ghia, a Los Angeles–based producer of nonalcoholic aperitifs, credits a large part of her company’s growth to the boom in e-commerce sales. She originally planned to launch in-person in New York, but pandemic closures got in the way.

The company counts New York among its largest markets, and Masarin said online orders account for 60% of its sales. 

Ghia’s strong social media presence is what allowed it to grow brick-and-mortar sales, she said. Although bigger buyers are just taking notice of the no-booze category, smaller retailers were easy to approach casually online.

“Our first 300 accounts came through Instagram,” Masarin said.

Alcohol-free offerings continue to be more of a hospitality play than a bestseller at bars and restaurants in the city. Santoro said zero-proof drinks account for only about 5% of beverages served at The Nines. At Le Dive, she said, the early-evening crowd orders strawberry sodas at a faster rate.

Despite the incremental revenue, zero-proof offerings can increase loyalty at restaurants and attract groups on the hunt for a permanent booze-free spot such as Skirt Steak, a restaurant in the Venti Hotel where Phony Negronis are on tap.

Bodkins has partnered with bars and restaurants to use customer data he’s collected from Boisson shoppers to help them build precise nonalcoholic menus for their clientele.

He can then point customers to every restaurant that carries their preferred bottles and give customers options about where to dine out based on their favorite nonalcoholic beverage.

“You can pick where you want to go,” he said.

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