“When John deBary started working as a bartender at the legendary New York City cocktail bar Please Don’t Tell in 2008, he noticed that customers occasionally requested cocktails without alcohol. To serve them, he developed a small set of recipes for nonalcoholic cocktails—or mocktails. After a while, he noticed that offering mocktails led to an increase in beverage sales.
When he went on to manage the cocktail programs for the popular Momofuku restaurants, he made a point to create a comprehensive list of mocktails.
Nonalcoholic offerings were rare and not all that good when deBary started his career. But in recent years, there has been an explosion of offerings—including no or low-alcohol versions of popular beers and increasingly sophisticated mocktails.”