Sobriety sips: The rise of non-alcoholic cocktails in India

non-alcoholic whiskey, please. An oxymoron has entered the bar. Who, indeed, wants a tipple minus the tipsiness? Ruchi Nagrecha did.

When the Mumbai-based techie-turnedteetotaller realised that water or sugary/ caffeinated drinks were the only choices before her, she and her husband Mohit Vadel decided to create alcohol-free cocktails. In October 2023, they launched the zero-proof cocktail brand Sobriety Sips.
Their customers may not be experiencing a high, but the brand is.

Nagrecha says what began as a passion project has become a fulltime business. Over the past year, Sobriety Sips has sold over 3,500 bottles of zero-proof cocktails and served more than 30,000 zeroproof cocktails at premium events. “We want to create sober experiences.

When we started out, we used to get comments like ‘Who’s going to drink this’, now people are talking about sobriety as a status symbol,” she says. The launch of 180 ml bottles has been a gamechanger for the brand that sells non-boozy cocktails such as Jungle Gin, Decaf Martini and Velvet Cosmo. Now 40% of its revenue comes from product sales, “with 50% repeat customers”.

They are about to launch a new format—recyclable, unbreakable test tubes of alcohol-free cocktails.
A non-alcoholic beverage (NAB) mimics the taste, aroma and complexity of alcoholic spirits like gin, whiskey or rum, but contains little to no alcohol (usually below 0.5% alcohol by volume or 0%). Unlike mixers or soft drinks like ginger ale and soda, these drinks are crafted with botanicals, herbs and spices and use distillation techniques to replicate the experience of traditional spirits without intoxication.