Every Friday, when Chris Marshall opens his bar, he gets the same customer request: Alcohol, please.
And every time someone asks for a vodka tonic or another familiar well drink, he has to gently remind them that his bar, Sans Bar, serves no alcohol.
âI can definitely help you with the tonic, not so much the vodka,â he said.
So heâll hand them a menu, where there are classic cocktail riffs and unlikelier combinations. Thereâs a ânada colada,â which mimics the tropical taste of a piña colada but with a photogenic infusion of alcohol-free blue curacao syrup. A newer addition of which Marshall is particularly proud, the Burnet lush, samples the garden, combining chlorophyll, asparagus brine, lemon juice and botanicals for something springy.
But at Sans Bar in Austin, Texas, the cocktails arenât the star. The customers are.
âWe make it about the experience and connection, not the drinks,â he said. âI mean, the drinks are amazing. But so much of what it means to be a bar is to be a place where people meet.â
Marshall is a member of a small class of sober bar owners who want to upend the idea that bars are exclusively places where alcohol is served. He and other sober bar impresarios believe bars should be community hubs where you can have fun without imbibing anything alcoholic.
And as the non-alcoholic beverage market steadily grows, so have sober bars. They operate in New York and Los Angeles, in Orlando and Sacramento, Atlanta and Omaha. And theyâre steadily growing their base of customers, including those who still drink but are exploring sobriety and people in recovery from substance use, by redefining what a bar can be.
âAs much as itâs a bar, I try to treat it like a classroom, where weâre learning how to socialize without alcohol,â Marshall said.
Sober bars are social hubs without alcohol
A sober bar usually looks and feels like any other. It might be upscale and minimalist or divey and lived-in. There may be handles lined up behind the bar but these bottles are zero-proof. Sober bars serve beers and wines that are non-alcoholic (though they can sometimes contain up to 0.5% ABV, or alcohol by volume, the Food and Drug Administrationâs for a beverage to still be considered non-alcoholic). And then there are the cocktails with all the trimmings but none of the liquor.
Many sober bars also serve coffee or drinks made with CBD or kava, a psychoactive root that, when consumed, can produce some mild sedative effects.
Marshall, though, refuses to serve coffee at Sans Bar, which is only open on Fridays from 6 p.m. to midnight.
âA coffee shop is a place to meet friends,â he said. âA bar is a place where you can meet strangers.â
That social principle is what convinced Abby Ehmann, who already owned a bar in New Yorkâs East Village, to open up a sober joint across the street.
Bars have always been, first and foremost, gathering places. Ehmannâs first bar, Lucky, quickly turned into a beloved neighbourhood joint with regulars who started showing up not just to drink, but to enjoy weekly game nights, live music and each otherâs company.
Ehmann isnât sober herself, but she âfelt pretty strongly that people who donât drink alcohol deserve a place to socialize thatâs comfortable and welcoming.â Their own Lucky.
So in 2022, Ehmann opened Hekate, a âcafé and elixir lounge,â which serves both Instagrammable mocktails and casual cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in a skinny, dimly lit room. Hekate is completely alcohol free (and so is the ).
Itâs not always easy to convince people to open up to each other without the âsocial lubricantâ of alcohol, Ehmann said. So she built a bar that facilitates intimacy â most of the seating is up at the bar, and customers are encouraged to work with their bartenders to whip up a personalized drink that could end up on the seasonal menu.
âTo me, an ideal bar is long and narrow, so you have to walk by everyone in order to go to the bathroom,â Ehmann said. âThe foot traffic allows for more mingling.â
At Hekate, she serves all kinds of customers, most of them sober. There are people who are sober for the moment â sheâs hosted several baby showers there â or sober for religious reasons. âSober Octoberâ and âDry Januaryâ are busy months, naturally, but many of those temporarily sober folks keep coming back all year.
âItâs easy to come in for a spell,â said Lux Heljardóttir, a rune reader who frequents Hekate. âThree minutes, if you let it, easily becomes three hours and youâll leave happier than you entered.â
The witchy vibe, eclectic menu and amiable regulars have drawn Dylan Kapit into Hekate around once a week this summer. Though theyâre partial to the non-alcoholic beers and wines, their current drink of choice is a liquor-free gin and tonic.
âAs a sober person, it is amazing to have a chill place that I can go where I can hang out and order mocktails without any judgment,â Kapit told CNN.
People are drinking less as non-alcoholic drinks become more popular
Sober bars are finding their footing in part due to the growing sober-curious movement.
People are becoming increasingly conscious of the deleterious effects that drinking can have on their mental and physical health. Even if theyâre not struggling with substance use, they might start limiting their alcohol intake or changing the way they socialize, becoming sober-curious, said author Ruby Warrington, who the term in 2016.
âPeople have realized that you donât have to have a 'drinking problem' for drinking to be a problem for them,â Warrington, who also wrote a called âSober Curious,â told CNN.
Not all Americans are drinking less, but alcohol is becoming less popular among young people, around whom many bar owners build their businesses. In a Gallup published last August, 62 per cent of adults under 35 said that they drink alcohol â down 10 percentage points from 20 years earlier.
Another Gallup from last August found that among the people who choose not to drink, almost one-fourth of them said that they didnât really have a reason â they just didnât want to. Other reasons for avoiding alcohol included disliking it, believing it could harm their health and fearing the consequences of consumption, among others.
âAlcohol is definitely having, and has had, a cigarette moment since at least 2016,â Marshall said. âWeâre coming up on a decade of people really evaluating alcoholâs place in our life. And itâs just no longer accepted that people consume a bunch of alcohol to have a good time.â
For many sober-curious people, thinking more critically about their drinking means giving non-alcoholic cocktails and canned beverages a chance.
Many of the people who seek out alcohol alternatives are more sober-curious than strictly sober. In 2022, Nielsen IQ that 82 per cent of people who buy non-alcoholic drinks are still buying beverages that contain alcohol.
âThis is more of a health movement than it is a sobriety movement,â he said. âAnd thatâs whatâs really exciting about it. I think (drinking) has become a public health issue.â
And the service industry is catching on. Even five years ago, it was rare for restaurants or bars to devote a section of their menu to non-alcoholic cocktails, said Ian Blessing, a former sommelier at the Michelin-starred Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry.
Then, he said âmost non-alcoholic cocktails were simple mixtures of fruit juice, soda, and syrup,â he said. Customers unfamiliar with non-alcoholic innovations may still shudder when they hear the word âmocktail,â reminded of the sickeningly sugary Shirley Temples of yore.
That perception is shifting, though, he said, thanks to the increasing availability of â and demand for â non-alcoholic spirits, botanicals, bitters and other essential ingredients. (Blessing and his wife, also a former sommelier, have released their own line of alcohol-free bitters, , marketed to customers sober or otherwise.) Even full-liquor bars are investing in well-crafted mocktails.
âThis is the best time in history to be sober because there are so many options,â Ehmann said.
When she opened Hekate, she said, she feared sheâd have to make all the drink components herself, but she gets free samples of new products now every week.
âThere are over a hundred (non-alcoholic) beers alone that are so delicious that you donât feel like youâre denying yourself anything,â she said.
Still, it can take some convincing for people to try a non-alcoholic drink even at a bar where liquor isnât served. Mi-Ya Mata of Dry Spokes in Omaha said she still has to try to disprove that âthe value of whatâs in the glass is defined by its alcohol content.â
Mata and her wife and co-owner, Leah Wright, spend time with each customer explaining the spectrum of non-alcoholic options and that they donât all taste like juice or soda. They even let customers sample the liquor-free spirits straight-up if theyâre doubtful.
Just donât call Dry Spokesâ drinks âmocktailsâ: âWe donât want to mock a cocktail,â Mata said. Mata and Wrightâs concoctions are delicious enough to stand on their own.
Sober bar customers arenât always sober
Marshall, who has been sober for 17 years and is also a counsellor, built Sans Bar for people in recovery. But most of his customers are sober-curious, not people who have struggled with alcohol use, he said.
âA lot of people in recovery still have a lot of apprehension about being in spaces where thereâs non-alcoholic spirits and non-alcoholic beer,â Marshall said. âPeople have said, âGosh, this really feels like Iâm in a bar.â Yup, you are, but we can recontextualize what âbarâ means.â
Warrington said that while sober bars might be a âgreat alternativeâ for sober people, trying to detach from âdrinking cultureâ may drive the sober and sober-curious away from bars altogether.
So Marshall has packed his bar with familiar activities and events that, hopefully, are even more fun with a zero-proof drink in hand.
On any given Friday at Sans Bar, patrons might run into sober karaoke or a trivia night or a panel for fellow sober people about how to date or change their habits to suit their sobriety. Dry Spokesâ events encourage communal fun, too, with queer meetups, comedy and drag shows, crafting events and book clubs â because even though the drinks are delicious, theyâre better enjoyed in the company of like-minded people.
âPeople feel grateful that they can still feel like adults without the negative sides of what an alcoholic bar can bring,â Mata said.
Sober bars are still risky business
Opening any brick-and-mortar business is a gamble, but sober bars face considerable challenges in staying open, said Marshall, who advises prospective sober bar owners. Non-alcoholic spirits can be expensive. Thereâs still confusion, even among sober people, about the kinds of drinks and experiences that a bar that doesnât serve alcohol can offer. Some customers might not understand why the prices of a liquor-less cocktail costs the same as an alcoholic counterpart.
âIt is not a business that makes crap-tons of money,â Ehmann said. âThere is no well liquor in the NA world yet, so the bottles, even at wholesale, are pretty expensive.â
But Ehmann is lucky, she said. Her rent is quite low for Manhattan, and her bar across the street is still thriving. And now, former patrons of Lucky who quit drinking still have a place where they can hang out with the same crowd, just without alcohol.
âThe profit margin isnât great,â she said. âBut I just feel like itâs a social necessity.â