How to Stock an Alcohol-Free Home Bar

The mistake almost everyone makes is buying bottles first. Non-alcoholic spirits are expensive — often $30 to $45 — and a shelf of them will make worse drinks than $40 of the right basics. Here's the order that actually works.

Buy these first (under $40 total)

• Fresh limes and lemons. Not bottled juice. This is the highest-impact purchase on the list and it isn't close.
• Sugar, for simple syrup. You already have it.
• Good tonic water and good soda water. Cheap mixers ruin good drinks — this is where supermarket-brand economy shows up most.
• Ginger beer with actual ginger in it. Check the label; a lot of it is ginger-flavored sugar water.
• Aromatic bitters. Technically alcoholic in trace amounts — skip if you're avoiding alcohol entirely, and use a non-alcoholic bitters alternative instead.
• Fine salt, for saline solution.

Then the equipment (under $50)

• A shaker. A cheap two-piece tin outperforms an expensive cobbler shaker.
• A jigger. Eyeballing measurements is the second most common reason home drinks taste wrong.
• A fine strainer, for anything with pulp or herbs.
• A big ice cube tray. Large cubes melt slower, so drinks stay strong instead of turning to water.

Only then, one bottle

With the basics above you can already make eight or nine genuinely good drinks. Now add exactly one non-alcoholic spirit and learn to build three drinks with it before you buy a second.

Which one to start with

A bitter aperitivo substitute is the highest-value first bottle. Bitterness is the flavor most missing from non-alcoholic drinking, it's the thing juice can't fake, and one bottle makes spritzes, highballs, and negroni-style drinks. A juniper-forward N/A gin is the sensible second — gin's identity is botanical rather than alcoholic, so the substitutes get closest to the original.

Skip N/A whiskey and rum until you're several bottles in. Barrel-aged spirits get their character from oak and ethanol working together, and without the alcohol most of them fall apart outside of a heavily mixed drink.

The upgrades worth making later

• A shrub — fruit, sugar, and vinegar. Adds a sharpness nothing else in the non-alcoholic world does, and you can make it at home for the price of the fruit.
• Verjus, the pressed juice of unripe grapes. Wine-like acidity without alcohol, excellent with food.
• A second syrup — cinnamon, honey, or ginger — to give you seasonal range.
• Non-alcoholic bitters, once you're making drinks weekly.

What to skip entirely

Pre-mixed mocktails in cans are convenient but almost always too sweet, and the price per drink is higher than making it yourself. 'Mocktail syrups' marketed as complete solutions are usually flavored sugar. And any bottle you're buying because it looks good on a shelf rather than because you know what drink you'll make with it.

Ten drinks to make with it: Mocktail recipes that actually taste good.