The Real Cost of a Drink With No Alcohol In It

A £12 drink with nothing in it that gets you drunk sounds like a con, but Bon Appétit reports that industry figures insist it isn’t — the price reflects real costs that have nothing to do with alcohol at all.

That framing is worth taking seriously, because the sceptical version of the story — bars marking up sparkling juice because customers will pay it — is the easy read and the wrong one.

Where the money actually goes

Alcohol itself is a fairly small line item in most cocktails; the mark-up on a gin and tonic has always been about the gin, sure, but it’s mostly about rent, glassware, ice, garnish and the ten seconds of a bartender’s attention. Take the spirit out and none of those costs disappear. What changes is that the drink now needs to work harder to justify its existence, which usually means more components, not fewer: a house-made shrub, a fat-washed syrup, a bitters blend built to mimic the weight alcohol normally supplies. Ethanol isn’t just a buzz-delivery mechanism — it’s a solvent, a preservative, a texture. Replacing what it does chemically is a research-and-development problem, and R&D costs money whether or not the customer can taste it.

Then there’s the supply side. Nonalcoholic spirits and aperitifs — the Seedlips and Ghias of the world — are made in small batches by companies without the century of scale that Diageo or Pernod Ricard bring to actual booze. Small batches mean higher unit costs, and those costs move straight through to the bar’s ingredient bill, then to the menu.

The bar’s side of the ledger

There’s also a less flattering explanation the sourced reporting only hints at: alcohol is how most bars make their real margin, because a bottle of spirit poured across forty drinks costs pennies per pour. A zero-proof drink can’t hide behind that arithmetic, so it gets priced closer to what it actually costs to make and serve — which can look expensive next to a cocktail that’s secretly subsidised by cheap vodka. In that sense, the £12 mocktail isn’t overpriced; the £12 martini next to it is underpriced, and has been for decades.

None of this fully answers why the sober-curious customer should accept parity pricing with alcohol they’re specifically avoiding. But it does explain why bars have little incentive to discount nonalcoholic drinks even as demand for them grows — the category isn’t a cheaper version of the menu, it’s a differently structured one, built on ingredients and labour rather than a markup on ethanol. Anyone ordering on “dry January” logic that a virgin drink should cost less is applying a subsidy that was never really about the alcohol to begin with.

Reported at Bon Appétit; analysis ours.