Alcohol-Free Drinks

Recent Recipes

• 1

  Egg Coffee From Andrea Nguyen

  Among Hanoi coffee specialties is egg coffee—super warm coffee with a floater or beaten egg yolk and sweetened condensed milk. It dates to the 1950s, supposedly when there was a shortage of milk in Hanoi. Beaten egg yolks with condensed milk extends the milk in an elegant, delicious manner. People likely hand-beat the yolks back then. Nowadays an electric mixer does the job in roughly 2 minutes. Egg coffee is rich and sweet, practically fancy-dessert-like. Enjoy it as an afternoon pick-me-up or serve it in small portions after dinner. Add 1 tablespoon whiskey or cognac for extra flourish. -Andrea Nguyen

• 2

  Magical Coffee

  This recipe was inspired by a drink I love at a local café. (Theirs is "magic coffee.") After my first taste, I went home and immediately started tweaking a recipe. They brew the coffee hot, but since it was summer and I am lazy, I wanted to use a cold-brewed coffee base, and I started with a recipe from the New York Times. There's lots of room for variation depending on what flavors you like—I did a Scandinavian version with white sugar, almond extract, and crushed fennel seeds too.

• 3

  Blood Orange Radler

  There is something about winter that makes me crave citrus. Maybe it’s because growing up I was always in charge of making fresh grapefruit juice for Christmas and the day after my mother’s birthday. Or maybe it’s because I’m a huge fruit-eater and all other fruits are essentially flavorless in New York City during colder months. Whatever the reason, when the temp drops, my thoughts turn to all varieties of tart seasonal fruits like tangerines, grapefruits, blood orange, yuzu, and Meyer lemons— to name a few.
  
  One of my favorite ways to incorporate citrus into my life is by combining them in all manner of cocktails, like this Radler variation that features IPA, lemon soda, blood orange, and Meyer lemon; plus a delicious non-alcoholic aperitif, Ghia, that’s flavored with botanicals such as rosemary, ginger, and gentian. You are free to use any manner of hoppy IPA you like, but my preference is to use a fully non-alcoholic one to make this drink as accessible as possible, although even if you used a regular IPA, this drink would be extremely low-proof—the equivalent of drinking half a can of beer.
  
  When building non-alcoholic drinks, you need to make every ingredient count. Alcohol is, among other things, a great solvent, meaning it picks up and keeps aromatic elements much more efficiently than water. (For a great example of this, try putting a black tea bag in one cup of water versus one cup of vodka, and compare the two after ten minutes.) The key to making sure your non-alcoholic drinks pack the same oomph as your higher-ABV drinks is to layer and nest flavors. Here we’re infusing plain honey with citrus peels, and using no water or ice that would supply flavorless dilution. Supporting this effort is the wood-aged and thyme-infused vinegar to give a complex hit of acidity.
  

• 4

  No-Proof Banana Daiquiri

  I came up with this recipe while hanging out with my sister who was going through this period where, for some reason, she couldn’t stop talking about Bananas Foster. It wasn’t anything we grew up with, but it was a curiosity that then stuck with me just as well. And so, I made it into a drink with a bit of a non-alcoholic twist.
  
  All the flavors in Seedlip Spice 94—like cardamom, allspice, and oak—complement the idea of a Bananas Foster and brown sugar-banana syrup is the cherry on top that makes this drink really sing. Instead of vanilla ice cream, a full fat yogurt adds a bit of tang and body to round out the drink, and the turmeric adds an earthy depth of flavor.
  
  A quick note of the banana syrup: This recipe makes more than you'll need for a single drink, so I recommend using the leftovers to top pancakes and waffles.