No longer drinking? There are options for you
On its surface, The Zero Co looks like any other bottle shop.
It’s a small space, just 600 square feet, with wide windows welcoming the sunlight. Wooden shelves line the white walls, holding rows of glass liquor and wine bottles, bitters, six packs of beer, seltzer, and the like. Some sport the colorful, bespoke labeling that has become synonymous with millennial marketing; while others are more traditional in their packaging, simply stating “Napa Valley,” “Red Blend” or tasting notes: pink grapefruit, hibiscus, wild seaweed.
It’s only on closer inspection that you would notice. “Non-alcoholic botanical spirit.” “Dealcoholized wine.” “Zero proof.”
The Zero Co, as its name suggests, is a bottle shop totally devoted to non-alcoholic beer, wine and spirits — like a zero proof liquor store. Opening in 2022 and situated in the trendy Poncey-Highlands neighborhood of Atlanta, The Zero Co advertises itself as the city’s first non-alcoholic bottle shop — but it is part of a growing trend both in Atlanta and across the country.
The number of people choosing to opt-out of alcohol, whether temporarily or permanently, has grown, and with it, the normalization of being alcohol-free. Restaurants have expanded mocktail lists, sober bars are on the rise, and non-alcoholic bottle shops are popping up in most major cities. These aren’t thoughtless alcohol replacements. With a level of care and craft — often with a price point matching their alcoholic counterparts — these substitutions are much, much more than a shirley temple.
More people want to drink less, data says
Amy Hook, a 46-year-old executive at an accounting firm, was browsing The Zero Co on a Friday afternoon. Alcohol just doesn’t improve her life, she told CNN, and sometimes it feels like it’s making things worse. A few weeks ago, she decided to cut back, and has been dabbling with making cocktails with non-alcoholic spirits. She doesn’t know if she’ll go back.
She’s right; she’s not alone. While some people have given up drinking entirely, a growing number of people have expressed interest in cutting back their alcohol intake — a movement colloquially dubbed “sober curious.”
While the majority of adults over the age of 21 still drink occasionally — in 2022, 68.2% reported having at least one drink in the last year, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, down ever so slightly from 70.7% in 2017 — an increasing number of Americans have reported trying to drink less, a potential sign that the way people drink is shifting.
Though research may be limited, the societal changes speak for themselves. One of the most popular signals has been the rise of Dry January, a trend that first took off around 2018, where people abstain from alcohol for the entire first month of the year. This type of “intermittent sobriety” is similar to the rise of intermittent fasting, said Colleen Myles, an associate professor studying fermented landscapes at Texas State University — people are choosing not necessarily to drink less, but to restrict their drinking at certain times.
But there are also those who have taken on the larger lifestyle change of “mindful sobriety,” Myles said, choosing to be more conscious of their drinking rather than abstaining completely.
“There’s this kind of negative connotation around people who have chosen to be sober or have needed to become sober due to health or mental health or addiction issues,” Myles said. “But these days, I think there are plenty of people, who do not have those strong countervailing reasons to not drink, that are choosing not to drink.”
Instead, drinking less — or not at all — is becoming more of a positive choice in some people’s life, in the same way others try to exercise more or eat better. Not drinking can become a part of self-optimization, Myles explained, where people try to become “the pinnacle of your best self.”
“It’s part of a whole package of wellness,” Myles said.
In part, the underlying cause of the shift could be the pandemic, she said. Alcohol sales jumped during those early months of lockdown, a well-documented trend, but research has shown that the sale of non-alcoholic beverages went up, too — revealing that many people were just drinking more of everything. People who may have experimented with mocktails in 2020 could have decided to stick with it. Or, the impact of a large-scale global health crisis may have nudged an inward reflection of their own health and well-being.
“Maybe people decided to try out different things because there was this weird global disruption going on,” Myles said. “And now some of those things, they were like ‘Hey, I actually like that.’”
From mocktails to dealcoholized wine
The shifting mindset around drinking is being reflected in the market. In addition to shops like The Zero Co, non-alcoholic beer has become widely available at big box stores and breweries alike. Some CVS stores have started carrying non-alcoholic liquor, while Target now sells non-alcoholic wine and spritzers. Actor Danny Trejo launched a line of zero proof gin and tequila alternatives last year.
It’s tempting to view these products as juice in a fancy bottle — poor imitations of the real thing. Doing so would be reductive.
Many non-alcoholic alternatives require a lot of effort to make, said Cory Atkinson, who co-owns The Zero Co and the alcoholic bottle store Elemental Spirits Co with his wife Malory. Much of non-alcoholic wine and beer actually starts out as alcoholic, and is then dealcoholized as an extra step. For spirits, there are scientists recreating the mouthfeel of alcohol with non-alcoholic components, stripping the spirit down to its core and recreating that flavor.
“There’s just so much research and development that goes into the products for you to be able to taste that and be like, ‘Yeah, it kind of tastes like gin,’” Atkinson said.