A tall glass of sparkling iced tea with a strip of lemon peel beside a stoneware jug, a bowl of fresh mint and a bunch of dark grapes on a worn wooden bar top

Before Zero-Proof: A Short History of Non-Alcoholic Drinks

September 30, 2026

The adult drink with no alcohol in it looks like a story of the last ten years: Dry January, distilled botanicals, canned cocktails without the rum. The record goes back much further. In 1651 a physician published a distilling handbook that Seedlip's founder later cited for its non-alcoholic remedies. A minister living next to a Leeds brewery published directions for making soda water in 1772. A Methodist dentist in New Jersey bottled unfermented grape juice in 1869 so his church could take communion without wine, and by the 1880s a Boston saloon with marble bars was serving mineral waters and egg phosphates and no liquor at all. What changed recently is the number of people choosing it. The history runs below in order, with a timeline showing what each era added to the glass.

1651: the physician's still

In 1651 the physician John French published The Art of Distillation, a handbook of distilling practice that Seedlip's founder later cited for its copper-stilled, non-alcoholic herbal remedies. The still was never only a machine for alcohol: physicians of the period used copper stills to draw remedies out of herbs, and French's book recorded their methods.

1772 to 1783: bubbles from a beer vat

Joseph Priestley, an English Unitarian minister and chemist, lived close to a brewery in Leeds and became fascinated by the gas rising from its fermenting vats. He called it fixed air; it is carbon dioxide. He worked out how to dissolve it in water, and in 1772 the London bookseller J. Johnson printed his pamphlet Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, whose full title promised to give ordinary water "the peculiar spirit and virtues of Pyrmont water, and other mineral waters of a similar nature." Priestley was imitating a spa water for health, not inventing a party drink. The idea for soda water came from a beer vat.

Jacob Schweppe, a jeweller working in Geneva, perfected a way of bottling carbonated water in 1783 and, by the company's own account, became the first to produce carbonated soft drinks on a mass scale. He later took the business to England. The commercial soda-water trade starts here.

1832: the pledge

In 1832 Joseph Livesey, a cheese-maker from Preston, led the pledge of total abstinence that made Preston the home of the teetotal movement in Britain. "Taking the pledge" came to mean giving up alcohol altogether. A movement that takes the drink away has to offer another one, and the rest of the century went into working out what.

1869: grape juice for the communion table

Thomas Bramwell Welch was born in Glastonbury, England, in 1825, emigrated to America as a child, and worked as a Methodist preacher, physician and dentist before settling in Vineland, New Jersey. In 1869, working with his son Charles, he applied Louis Pasteur's heat treatment to grape juice, heating it enough to kill the yeast and then sealing the bottles so it could not ferment. The aim was religious: a communion cup of "the fruit of the vine" with no wine in it. Methodist legislators had recommended "the pure juice of the grape" for communion in 1864, and the church made grape juice mandatory in 1916. Charles, who had left dentistry in 1893 to concentrate on the juice, incorporated the Welch Grape Juice Company in 1897. Welch's bottled grape juice began as a temperance product.

1882 to 1890: the temperance bar

Temperance reformers understood early that the tavern was a social room as well as a place to drink. A New York temperance society counted 44 "temperance taverns" in the state in 1831, though these were mostly inns. On February 1, 1882, Charles Sumner Eaton opened a saloon in Boston he called the Temperance Spa, later renamed Thompson's Spa, with men in white coats and caps behind marble bars serving no alcohol. It became known for mineral waters imported from France and Germany and for alcohol-free cocktails with names such as "Next Morning" and "Moxie Nerve Food." Among the most popular was the egg phosphate, a lemonade-like drink shaken with an egg and tangy acid phosphate. Within five years the saloon was selling some 1,200 of them on the most humid summer days.

Northern England built its own version. Temperance bars in the mill towns opened early in the morning to sell soft drinks to the first shift. Mr Fitzpatrick's in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, opened in 1890, when such bars were common, and still serves sarsaparilla, blood tonic and dandelion and burdock. It is described today as Britain's last temperance bar.

1919: the half percent

National Prohibition turned the temperance argument into law and drew a numerical line. The National Prohibition Act of 1919, the Volstead Act, covered "any such beverages which contain one-half of 1 per centum or more of alcohol by volume," the definition the Supreme Court quoted in Jacob Ruppert v. Caffey in 1920. The figure had a history. In a case decided the same term, the Court noted that the Treasury "may have declared taxable" beer containing one-half of one per centum of alcohol, and called the point unimportant, since tax rulings did not turn on whether a drink was intoxicating.

2013 to 2025: the drinker changes

The modern chapter starts with a month. Emily Robinson gave up alcohol in January 2011 to train for a half marathon, joined the charity now called Alcohol Change UK in 2012, and in 2013 the organization launched Dry January with 4,000 people. In 2024 it counted 215,000 taking part worldwide, roughly 54 times the first year.

The drinks followed the drinkers. In November 2015 Ben Branson launched Seedlip at Selfridges in London, billed as the first non-alcoholic distilled spirit: six individually distilled barks, spices and citrus peels, with no added sugar or sweeteners, and a stated debt to French's 1651 book. The category of adult non-alcoholic drinks now runs from distilled botanicals to sparkling teas, as in the Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Company guide, to ready-to-drink cocktails such as Blind Tiger's Southside Mojito (shop Blind Tiger Southside Mojito).

The numbers behind it are American as well as British. In August 2025 Gallup reported that a record-low 54 percent of U.S. adults say they drink alcohol, the lowest figure since it began asking in 1939. From 1997 to 2023 the figure never fell below 60 percent, and its highs of 68 to 71 percent all came between 1974 and 1981, so the 2025 result sits 17 points below the peak. Among adults under 35, the figure fell from 59 percent in 2023 to 50 percent. For the first time in Gallup's trend, a majority, 53 percent, said even moderate drinking is bad for one's health.

What the history adds up to

Three motives run through nearly four centuries of it. The first is medicine: French's herbal remedies and Priestley's imitation spa water were meant to do the body good. The second is morality. Livesey's pledge and Welch's communion juice were arguments against drink, and the Boston temperance saloon was the same argument with a marble bar. The third, arriving now, is health and plain choice, which returns to the first motive without the second. Each wave left a drink behind: soda water from medicine, bottled grape juice from the church, cordials and phosphates from the temperance bar, and the distilled non-alcoholic spirit from a seventeenth-century book reread in 2015.

Year	What happened	What it added to the glass
1651	John French publishes The Art of Distillation, later cited by Seedlip for its non-alcoholic remedies	The idea of a sober distillate
1772	Priestley's Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air	Soda water
1783	Jacob Schweppe begins bottling carbonated water in Geneva	The commercial soft drink
1832	Joseph Livesey leads the teetotal pledge in Preston	A reason to want an alternative
1869	Thomas Welch pasteurizes grape juice for communion	Bottled unfermented juice
1882	Eaton's Temperance Spa (later Thompson's Spa) opens in Boston	The alcohol-free bar and the egg phosphate
1890	Fitzpatrick's opens in Rawtenstall	Sarsaparilla, dandelion and burdock, herbal cordials
1919	The Volstead Act sets the half-percent line	A legal number for "non-intoxicating"
2013	Dry January launches with 4,000 people	A calendar habit
2015	Seedlip launches at Selfridges	The distilled non-alcoholic spirit
2025	Gallup records 54 percent of U.S. adults drinking, a record low	A record share of adults who do not drink

For the present-day category, the non-alcoholic drinks guide covers the styles, and the zero-proof Negroni recipe and the guide to cooking with zero-proof drinks put them to use. Bitters come out of the same apothecary tradition as French's remedies, and the history of bitters and the cocktail bitters guide pick up that thread. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ships nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.