About & Privacy

The Dry Bar reviews non-alcoholic drinks and publishes mocktail recipes with the same seriousness a good cocktail bar gives the drinks with alcohol in them. It’s a one-person, unpaid passion project — every review here is a drink that’s actually been bought and tasted, every recipe has actually been mixed and served. Nothing is sponsored, and no rating is for sale.

How we taste

A few things are worth knowing before you trust a rating on this site.

“Non-alcoholic” isn’t always 0.00% alcohol. The FDA allows anything with 0.5% ABV or less to be labeled non-alcoholic. The usual offenders are non-alcoholic beer and regular bitters — bitters, in particular, are genuinely high-proof, you just use so little of it that the alcohol content of the drink stays negligible. If you need a true zero, read labels yourself; don’t take “non-alcoholic” on the package at face value.

Some of these have real cocktail-culture ingredients with their own cautions. Gentian root and other botanicals show up often and aren’t recommended in pregnancy. If you’re pregnant and shopping in person, asking “is this pregnancy safe?” is a normal question — a good shop will know what you mean.

Sugar content varies wildly and unpredictably, even within one brand’s lineup, and even between drinks that don’t taste sweet. We call it out when it’s notable, but read your own label if it matters to you.

Refrigerate after opening. Alcohol is a preservative; most of what replaces it isn’t. Most of these want to be finished within days to weeks of opening, not months.

The early, easy-to-find brands aren’t the ceiling. A handful of early movers (Seedlip, Ritual, Lagunitas, Curious Elixirs, among others) got distribution first and became the default answer, especially behind actual bars. That doesn’t mean they’re the best answer — the category has grown a lot since, and some newer, harder-to-find brands are meaningfully better.

Quality is inconsistent within a single brand, far more than it is for actual alcohol. One product from a brand can be excellent and its sibling product can be genuinely bad. We try a brand more than once before writing it off, and we don’t assume a product we haven’t tasted is good just because a different product from the same brand was.

Our biases, stated plainly

Every review here is filtered through one palate, so you should know its shape. We tend toward spicy, bitter, and smoky flavors — including in real cocktails, where negronis and mezcal-forward drinks are more our speed than most people’s. We’d rather a mocktail be unapologetically its own thing than a careful impression of a real cocktail — the same instinct that makes us prefer vegetable-forward cooking to food that’s trying to taste like meat. We’re not big on heavily juice-based or straightforwardly sweet drinks, though sugar content itself isn’t something we obsess over.

And when we’re “having a drink,” we want it to feel like a thing — a considered choice, not an upgraded soda. If we wanted a soda, we’d have a soda, or mix our own bitters and soda water.

A few patterns hold up across a lot of tasting: non-alcoholic aperitifs and amari tend to work well if you liked the alcoholic originals, since the herbal bitterness was doing most of the flavor work there anyway. Plain bitters and good soda water punches well above its price. Fake tequila is almost uniformly bad; fake whiskey and bourbon are only a little better. Near beer has improved enormously in the last couple of years. And the most reliable path to a genuinely good drink isn’t chasing a faithful copy of a cocktail you miss — it’s treating the ingredient as its own thing and building something new around it.

About this site, practically

• No accounts. The site is fully read-only. There’s no login, no comments, no saved favorites, and no newsletter signup.
• No invasive tracking. Analytics here is GoatCounter, self-hosted on our own server, used only to see which pages get read. It sets no cookies and no identifiers — so there’s no cross-site tracking, no ad network, and no cookie-consent banner, because nothing here requires one.
• No paid placement. If affiliate links are ever added to review pages down the line, they’ll be added to reviews that already exist on their own editorial merits — a product’s rating is never for sale, and a link being present is never why a review exists.

Questions, corrections, or a bottle you think we’re sleeping on? We’re always open to it — the goal is just to get the ratings right.