Faux Booze Is on a Bender

Driven by changing social trends and a diverse group of entrepreneurs, a non-alc revolution is stirring and shaking the drinks industry.

- BILL SAPORITO

Like many a novelist before him, Marcus Sakey valued the rite and reward of savoring a cocktail while pondering plot twists, especially with his good friend and drinking buddy David Crooch. But he also knew that gin, in particular, has a bad temper, and is nobody's friend the next day. One evening, over drinks and a chess game, the pair pondered a new business plot: gin and whiskey analogs that could deliver the experience-the ritualof a mixed drink without the alcohol.

Laura Taylor was a corporate warrior, an engineer by training, who was marching along in a career with the likes of Rockwell, Accenture, IBM, and Tableau. She routinely mixed work and drinking until the drinking got to be a bit too routine. But trying to stop proved difficult, given there were few interesting nonalcoholic options. That's when she decided to make one.

Molly Fedick was the creative director at Hinge, a dating app, and enjoying the club and party scene in New York City like a proper young professional when the pandemic first shelved her social life and then her job. Relocating to Lake Tahoe, Nevada, she often gathered with the locals for après-ski beverages in the parking lot, since the bars were shut. Having given up alcohol, though, she was repeatedly chided by the ski bums for being a buzzkill. To her social media-trained brain, that began to sound more and more like a brand.