“Bartenders often approach recipe development with questions like, “What if we did a Slivovitz Singapore Sling, or a chestnut fat-washed Negroni?” This easy language, this information-rich shorthand is made possible by decades, if not centuries, of bartenders putting in work, night after night, to build out a robust lineage for almost all of the drinks that get shaken, stirred and poured into glasses the world over.
There is one glaring caveat to this backstory of cocktails: Almost all of the recipes contain alcohol. For the majority of cocktail drinkers, this is fine. But for as long as people have been drinking, people have also been not drinking, yet it’s only in the past five to 10 years that the mixology world has begun to pay significant attention to the nonalcoholic side of things. Walk into a cocktail bar in 2013 and you’d be shocked to encounter even one spirit-free cocktail; now, it’s almost shocking not to see at least a handful of zero-ABV drinks sprinkled throughout the brandy and bourbon drinks. Despite this, we’re nowhere near that complex, interconnected tapestry of alcohol-based recipes.”