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Skip the Bar—and the Booze

FROM DERICK SANTIAGO

Are you sober-curious? Thinking about trying a Dry January? Or maybe you’d just like to take a break from holiday-season partying. You don’t have to resort to fruit juices or club soda. You can still enjoy a carefully crafted adult drink with balanced, delicious, and complex flavors all served in a fancy glass with a beautiful garnish. Thanks to today’s increasingly wide array of zero-proof and nonalcoholic spirits, beers, wines, and bitters, modern mocktails are breaking boundaries and changing minds! With substitutes for whiskey, rum, gin, and other spirits, now you can create quality nonalcoholic drinks that have the same complexity, appearance, and taste as standard cocktails—just without the alcohol. 
 
Here are two sophisticated mocktails to try from The Mocktail Club. 
 
Maple Old-Fashioned 
Instead of using sugar and dissolving it with water, this version of an old-fashioned uses bourbon barrel–aged maple syrup. This enhances the notes of oak and vanilla that come from the nonalcoholic bourbon.  
 
2 ounces nonalcoholic bourbon 
1 teaspoon bourbon barrel–aged maple syrup 
4 dashes alcohol-free aromatic bitters 
1 orange peel and 1 maraschino cherry for garnish 
  1. Place your mixing glass in the freezer, allowing it to chill as you gather and prepare the other ingredients. 
  2. When ready, take out the mixing glass from the freezer and in it combine nonalcoholic bourbon, maple syrup, and bitters. Add large cubes of ice so that the mixing glass is two-thirds full. 
  3. Using a bar spoon, stir so that the spoon slowly circles around the glass in a manner that gets the ice to rotate as well. Stir about 30 seconds. 
  4. Put a big cube of ice into a rocks glass. Strain the mixture into the rocks glass. 
  5. Express orange oil from orange peel over the drink. Do this by squeezing the pith side of the peel toward the top of the drink so the oils spray into it. Finally, garnish with orange peel and cherry on a cocktail pick. 
 
Rosemary Citrus Fizz 
This mocktail has a unique blend of bright and bitter citrus flavors, thanks to the strength of the grapefruit and the herbal depth of the rosemary. In this recipe, the rosemary sprig is added to the shaker just before shaking. This method is similar to “regal shaking” in which a citrus peel is added directly in the shaker prior to shaking. Including the rosemary breaks down the herb, allowing the release of its oils, which are then incorporated into the drink. 
 
2 ounces grapefruit juice 
1/2 ounce lemon juice 
1/2 ounce simple syrup 
2 rosemary sprigs, divided 
4 ounces chilled nonalcoholic sparkling brut 
  1. In a cocktail shaker, combine grapefruit juice, lemon juice, simple syrup, and 1 rosemary sprig. Add large cubes of ice, cover the shaker, and shake vigorously 10–12 seconds or until the exterior of the shaker becomes visibly frosty. 
  2. Using a fine-mesh strainer, double-strain the mixture into a champagne flute. 
  3. Top with nonalcoholic sparkling brut. Lightly stir to combine all ingredients. 
  4. Finally, garnish with the remaining rosemary sprig. 
 
 
The Mocktail Club

Classic Recipes (and New Favorites) Without the Booze

By Derick Santiago

Skip the bar—and the alcohol—with mocktail recipes that bring the fun of a speakeasy right to your couch! The Art of Mixology meets mocktails in this beautiful collection of 75 alcohol-free recipes for classic drinks, new flavor concoctions, and twists on old favorites, so you can experience the joy of cocktail creation without the booze!

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