Every host has a blind spot, and this is usually it. Enormous care goes into the wine, the beer gets thought about, someone agonises over whether to do a cocktail, and then the non-drinking contingent is handed a warm bottle of lemonade from the back of a cupboard. It is not that hosts do not care. It is that non alcoholic party drinks are rarely thought about as drinks in their own right, with their own requirements.
They have those requirements, and they are not complicated. Get them right and the third of your guest list who is driving, pregnant, on medication, in training or simply not in the mood will have a genuinely good evening rather than a patient one.
Alcohol does specific work in a glass. It carries aroma, it adds body and a faint warmth, and it cuts through sweetness. Take it out and you are left with sugar and water, which is why a lot of non-alcoholic offerings taste childish even when they are made from good ingredients.
The fix is to replace what alcohol was doing rather than simply omitting it. That means three levers: acidity, from fresh lemon or lime rather than a bottle; bitterness, from tonic, strong tea, grapefruit or a dash of bitters; and dilution, from proper ice and a longer serve. Almost every disappointing soft drink can be rescued by adding one of the three.
The same logic that applies to cocktails applies here. One well-made long drink, batched in a jug, beats a table of bottles nobody feels excited about.
A reliable formula: strong cold-brewed tea or a tart fruit base, fresh citrus, a small amount of sugar syrup, and sparkling water or tonic poured over ice at the last moment. Cold-brewed Earl Grey with lemon and a splash of tonic is genuinely excellent and costs almost nothing. So is pink grapefruit juice with soda, a squeeze of lime and a sprig of rosemary. Make it in advance, keep the fizz separate until serving, and let people pour their own.
Garnish it exactly as you would an alcoholic drink. This sounds cosmetic and is not. Being handed something that looks like an afterthought is the whole problem non-drinkers describe.
If you are buying anything for the non-drinkers, spend it here. A good tonic water served very cold in a wine glass with ice and a wedge of grapefruit is a perfectly respectable drink on its own, and the same is true of a quality ginger beer with lime.
Buy small bottles rather than large ones. A two-litre bottle of anything fizzy is flat within an hour of opening, and flat mixers are worse than no mixers. Small bottles cost slightly more per litre and are worth every penny in a party context. The same logic applies whether you are pouring them neat or building spirits and mixers for everyone else.
This is the least glamorous point in this article and possibly the most useful. Most people at a party are mildly dehydrated within two hours, and almost nobody will go and find a glass of water for themselves because it feels like admitting defeat.
Put jugs of iced water with cucumber, lemon or mint on the same table as everything else. Guests will drink it, they will feel better, and your evening will run longer and end better. It also does more for the following morning than any remedy you can buy.
Aim for around a third of your total drinks to be non-alcoholic. That sounds high until you count everyone who alternates. For fifteen guests over an evening, that means roughly four litres of sparkling water, three to four litres of soft drinks or mixers, one batched jug serving around twelve, and plenty of ice.
Ice is the constraint people always underestimate. Non-alcoholic long drinks are served over more ice than their alcoholic equivalents, not less, because dilution is doing part of the job that alcohol would otherwise do. Buy about a kilo per person and you will not be caught out.
The single most effective thing a host can do costs nothing at all. Serve non-alcoholic drinks from the same table, in the same glassware, with the same garnishes as everything else. Do not announce them separately. Do not put them in the kitchen while the wine is in the garden.
Offer them first, too. Handing someone a proper glass of something interesting the moment they arrive removes the small awkward negotiation about whether they are drinking, and it means they never have to explain themselves. That is the actual point of hosting.
Mixers, soft drinks and snacks are exactly the things that get forgotten in the main shop and then need a separate trip at the worst possible moment. If you are ordering the wine and beer anyway, add the non-alcoholic side to the same basket and save yourself the errand.
And if you run out mid-evening, which is by far the most common outcome, we deliver across London in 30 to 45 minutes, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Check our delivery areas, order the tonic you forgot, and carry on hosting.
Please drink responsibly. Drinks House 247 operates a Challenge 21 policy - you must be 18 or over to order, and our drivers will ask for photo ID if you look under 21.
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