Dinner service at Canlis doesn’t start for another three hours; atop the restaurant’s bar, a stockpot full of tarragon and parsley syrup cooks down with lemon peels and sugar over an induction burner.

Together, says head barman José Castillo, these ingredients produce a syrup almost reminiscent of Pernod.  Bartenders combine the final, cooled version with a shrub made from the Japanese sweet potato satsumaimo, plus ginger and a dusting of cinnamon.

The result glows a mellow orange in its delicate coupe—refreshing and complex with an innate food compatibility not unlike wine. A few weeks later, Castillo will tweak it again, using mint tea, as one of the four entries on the “free-spirited” section of Canlis’s restrained drink list.

For years, the esteemed restaurant’s bar kept a few mocktails in quiet rotation: fruit-forward concoctions ordered mostly by sophisticated Canlis-going kids. Abstaining adults would order a nonalcoholic beer, maybe some sort of soda. But when the restaurant retired its series of pandemic popups to resume its regular fine dining ethos in 2021, customers wanted less alcohol. And more of it.

The bar team has waded through the thicket of spirit-free products that have hit the market in recent years. Not all of it has been good. “It tastes like perfume” was a frequent note during Castillo’s sampling. Building NA cocktails with sufficient intrigue, and viscosity, often means working more directly with the kitchen to create new syrups, teas, or other components. “Our job is to get better at this craft, because it’s a whole new thing,” he says.

Somewhere around the time we started going out again post-shutdown, NA drinks migrated from afterthought to main event in a certain caliber of Seattle bar. At Stampede Cocktail Club in Fremont, bar manager Adam Fought estimates one person in every party of five or six will go the spirit-free route. The bar was one of the first to plant a flag at making great temperate drinks; today it maintains roughly six NA cocktails on its rotating themed menu. Developing these takes two or three times as long as R&D for a typical cocktail, says Fought—“you get so much flavor from fermentation and alcohol.”

But it’s worth the effort. According to one industry study on mocktails (an unfortunate term most bartenders try to avoid), sales of nonalcoholic beverages rose 33 percent in 2024. Another reported that 41 percent of Americans are trying to drink less alcohol…especially after turning to it so much more in the depths of the pandemic. In November 2023, Cheeky and Dry opened on Phinney Ridge, giving Seattle its first alcohol-free bottle shop. Seattle-based company the Pathfinder is one of the three biggest names in NA spirits (along with Wilderton and Lustre); it debuted at Capitol Hill bar Life on Mars in 2021.

Anthony Spruill, the longtime lead bartender at Eight Row, has a personal theory. While much of society spent the 2020 shutdown making sourdough or bingeing Tiger King, certain service industry people, untethered from their usual routine, had time to test ideas for alcohol-free products that had languished on the Before Times back burner. “Everybody had time to try things.”

Spruill got sober during Covid. “My choices were—to be really blunt—keep drinking and probably die, or get clean,” he says. “Covid made that such a larger-than-life problem as everybody was dealing with their emotions and depression and, again, downtime.”

By the time Seattle was ready to start going out again, many of us had cleaned up our lifestyles. But we still craved the in-person connection bars can offer. Enter NA drinks. In Spruill’s experience, “there’s more of an accepting market for it than there was.”

In June, Eight Row closed its doors for the foreseeable future; Spruill subsequently moved to the new Strega Pizzeria for a time. While there, he played with fennel bulbs—“turning that into something, probably a nonalcoholic vermouth, doing a spritzer thing.” His background means diners get thoughtful spirit-free drinks, even at a place with a small bar program compared to, say, the one at Canlis. At Strega and in his current role at Fremont pizzeria Lupo, he appreciates a drink list that includes a well-chosen NA beer—another drink category that’s exploded of late: “As a person going out to restaurants, I love a singular beer with dinner,” says Spruill. “It’s stuck in my head, and I can’t change my ways.”