A look at the economics of the craft mocktail keeps landing on the same uncomfortable-sounding conclusion: a well-made alcohol-free drink can cost nearly as much as its spirited counterpart, and there is a real reason for it. The liquor is often a surprisingly small slice of a cocktail's price. Strip it out and you are left with everything else that made the drink cost what it did: fresh-squeezed juice, house syrups and infusions, the non-alcoholic spirits that are not cheap themselves, ice, garnish, glassware, and the hour or more of batching and prep that happens before the bar even opens.
On top of the ingredients sits the same labor and overhead as any other drink on the menu. Someone still has to build it to order, and the rent, the equipment, and the wages do not fall away because the glass is alcohol-free. In one accounting of a roughly twelve-dollar mocktail, the ingredients were the smaller line and the remaining ten or so dollars went to labor, equipment, overhead, and profit, the unglamorous machinery behind every drink a bar serves.
The Cr(af)ted Take
This is the price of being taken seriously, and it is worth paying. For years the alcohol-free option was a warm soda and a lime wedge handed over for free or close to it, and it felt exactly as valued as it was priced. A twelve-dollar mocktail is a bar saying the opposite: that the drink was designed, prepped, and built with the same care as everything else, and is worth sitting down for. You cannot ask for alcohol-free to be treated as a real drink and also expect it to be priced like an afterthought.
The honest tension is that a guest can make a version at home for a fraction of the cost, which is true of a Negroni too. What you are buying out is the same thing you always were: the fresh juice you did not have to squeeze, the syrup you did not have to cook, the technique, and the night off. The mistake is measuring a mocktail against the cost of its absent alcohol instead of against the cocktail it stands in for. Judge it as a drink, not as a discount, and the price stops looking strange. It is the clearest sign yet that the good stuff has arrived, because nobody charges twelve dollars for an afterthought.
Original reporting: Axios →