Mocktails in Pubs | Demand for Alcohol-Free Cocktails Up 19%

Britain Isn’t Giving Up Cocktails. It’s Giving Up the Alcohol

Ordering a 0% mojito in a pub used to feel like announcing something about yourself. It doesn’t any more. New Greene King research shows demand for alcohol-free cocktails up 19% on 2024, making them the second-biggest low and no category in its pubs behind alcohol-free beer.

By Vim, Editor of 12×75

There is a moment in a British pub that used to be quietly humiliating. Someone at the table is not drinking, for whatever reason, none of which is anybody’s business, and the barman looks at them expectantly, and the options are: lime and soda, Coke, orange juice, or a pint of tap water served with the faint air of a punishment. The rest of the table gets a proper drink. The non-drinker gets a consolation prize with ice in it.

That moment is disappearing, and the evidence has just arrived from the largest pub company in the country. Greene King’s new research shows demand for alcohol-free cocktails has risen 19% compared with 2024, making cocktails the second-largest low and no category across its pubs, behind only alcohol-free beer and ahead of low and no cider and wine. The 0% passionfruit martini is no longer the drink you settle for. It is a drink you order.

That is a smaller sentence than it looks. It marks a shift in British drinking culture from “drink alcohol or don’t go drinking” to something considerably more sensible: the pub stays, the ritual stays, the good glass stays, and the alcohol becomes optional.

Alcohol-free cocktails are surging in British pubs

The scale of Greene King’s estate is what makes this worth paying attention to. This is not a Shoreditch bar with an interesting menu. It is 1,600 managed pubs stocking more than 300 non-alcoholic drinks across beer, spirits, cocktails, wine, cider, soft drinks and hot drinks. When a business that size reports a category shift, it is describing what is happening in market towns and retail parks, not just in London.

The detail I find most telling is not a number at all. This year Greene King has aligned its alcoholic and non-alcoholic cocktail menus: 0% versions of mojitos, passionfruit martinis and bellinis, sitting alongside the originals rather than exiled to a box at the bottom of the page marked “soft drinks.” That is a design decision, and design decisions reveal what a company actually believes. Putting the 0% mojito next to the mojito says these are the same kind of thing. Which, socially, they now are.

“Moderation is now a part of everyday life, and the days of being limited to ordering water or soft drinks when people are looking for a non-alcoholic drink are thankfully over.”

Danny Ayton, Trading Director, Drinks, Greene King

This isn’t Dry January any more

The old model of British moderation was penitential and seasonal. You destroyed yourself in December, went dry in January, felt superior for four weeks, then returned to normal service in February with a slightly smug story about how much better you slept. It was a purge, not a habit.

Greene King surveyed 1,200 consumers this summer and found 44% now moderate across the year rather than confining it to Dry January. And the occasions are the interesting part. Low and no drinking during sporting occasions rose 11% against 2024, with date nights close behind. Consider what those two have in common: they are both occasions where you are out, engaged in something, and would rather be present for it. Watching a match you care about, or sitting opposite someone you are trying to impress, are not moments that improve with four pints. They are moments that improve with a drink in your hand and your wits intact.

That is a different logic from abstinence. Nobody in that survey is giving up the pub. They are giving up the automatic assumption that being in the pub means drinking alcohol.

Half of young drinkers are already doing it

Greene King is one company, so here is the national picture from Drinkaware’s 2025 analysis, which draws on the only nationally representative survey of British drinking habits, run annually since 2018 with a 2025 sample of over 7,000 adults.

Two findings deserve more attention than they got. The first is that among 18 to 34-year-olds, use has gone from roughly a quarter to roughly half in seven years. The second, and Drinkaware’s chief executive Karen Tyrell said as much when the report landed, is the rise among people drinking above the low-risk guidelines: alcohol-free use has more than tripled, from 7% to 23%, and 59% of them are using it as a replacement rather than an addition. Only 9% are drinking it alongside regular alcohol.

That is the number that turns this from a lifestyle trend into something with a public-health dimension, and it is why the growth of these drinks now appears in the government’s ten-year health plan.

Beer normalised it. Cocktails made it fun

The cultural progression matters, because alcohol-free beer did the unglamorous work first. In January 2025, Greene King reported draught alcohol-free sales up 238% year on year across its estate, with three of its five top-selling packaged beer and cider brands being alcohol-free. Guinness 0.0 and Peroni 0.0 became routine top sellers. Alcohol-free beer is now almost half of the company’s low and no sales.

Beer’s achievement was making the whole idea unremarkable. A pint glass with something dark in it looks like a pint glass with something dark in it, and nobody at the table needs to have a conversation about it. I have written before about why Guinness 0.0 became my everyday pick, and the honest answer is that it lets you participate without explaining yourself.

But beer only ever solved the problem of not standing out. Cocktails solve a different and more interesting one. A cocktail is a thing you choose. It arrives in the right glass, it has been made rather than poured, it costs about what everyone else’s costs, and it looks like an occasion. Beer made alcohol-free drinking normal. Cocktails made it pleasurable, and, crucially, socially equivalent. Nobody looks at a passionfruit martini and thinks “ah, the abstainer.” They think that looks quite good, actually.

People aren’t giving up the pub

It is worth stating plainly, because the low and no story often gets bolted onto a gloomier one about pub closures, and they are not the same story. The pubs closing are closing for reasons I have written about at length: a £5.91 pint, 12p of profit per pint, two closures a day, a tax burden that takes roughly a third of everything crossing the bar.

What the Greene King data shows is the opposite pressure. People still want the room, the company, the ritual and the glass. What has changed is that a growing share of them want to have that evening and drive home, or be functional tomorrow, or simply not drink four units on a Tuesday because a Tuesday does not warrant it. The occasion survives. Only the contents of the glass are up for negotiation, and for a pub, a customer buying two £9 alcohol-free cocktails is considerably better business than a customer who stayed at home because there was nothing there for them.

Pubs are still catching up

Now the uncomfortable bit, because demand is moving faster than menus. A KAM and Everleaf audit of 131 venues across London and Manchester, representing 3,832 UK pubs, bars and restaurants, found that 98% offered at least one alcohol-free drink, which sounds like a solved problem until you look at how it is presented.

That last line is the killer comparison, and it is Everleaf’s, not mine. Every single venue catered for vegetarians, with an average of 37% of dishes meat-free. Around 6 to 7% of Britons are vegetarian. Roughly 16% do not drink. The group that is more than twice as large is served considerably worse.

There has been progress since: a 2026 follow-up found alcohol-free spirits now stocked in 70% of venues, up from 47%, and non-alcoholic draught beer up to 26%. But the cocktail gap persists, with alcoholic cocktails available at roughly three times the rate of alcohol-free ones. Greene King’s own research says the same thing from the customer side: visibility, range and price are the biggest factors in whether people choose a low or no drink, and most customers now expect a dedicated section on the menu rather than a hunt.

Which is the whole problem in one sentence. Stocking it is not the same as offering it. A bottle in a fridge that nobody can see is not a menu item; it is inventory.

The mocktail has a price problem

And here is where I lose half the room. Alcohol-free cocktails cost more than people think they should, and the objection is always the same: there is no spirit in it, so why am I paying £9?

It is a fair instinct and a slightly wrong one. What you are paying for in any cocktail is only partly the alcohol. It is the labour of somebody making it properly, the fresh juice and the syrup and the garnish, the ice, the glassware, the time, and the rent on the room you are sitting in. Alcohol-free spirits and aperitifs are also not cheap to buy; a good bottle costs a bar roughly what a mid-range gin does. Strip the alcohol out and the cost does not fall by anything like the amount drinkers expect.

That said, the gap cannot be nothing. If a 0% mojito costs the same as a full-strength one, a reasonable customer will feel got at, and Greene King’s own research puts price among the top three factors in the decision. The venues getting this right seem to be pricing the alcohol-free version slightly below its alcoholic twin: enough to acknowledge the difference, not so much that it signals a lesser drink. That is a narrow line, and a lot of pubs have not found it yet.

Is Britain actually drinking less?

Yes, but not in the way the headlines usually mean. Drinkaware’s 2025 monitor shows 14% of UK adults drinking four or more times a week, down from 18% in 2018, and weekly binge drinking down from 15% to 11%, with 82% now drinking within the guidelines. Less often, and less per occasion.

What that is not is mass sobriety. It is a country recalibrating, the same way it did with smoking indoors and drink-driving, except without legislation and largely without anyone announcing it. The interesting thing about this particular shift is that it has been led by drinkers rather than imposed on them, and the drinks industry has spent five years scrambling to catch up, which is roughly the reverse of how these things normally go. If you want the wider version of that argument, it is in how Gen Z actually drinks and in the rise of the ready-to-drink can, which is the same instinct in a different format.

The last word

For most of my drinking life the British social contract was simple and slightly stupid: alcohol was the price of admission. You could attend without drinking, but you did it at a cost, in explanations, in a worse drink, in the small social tax of being the one who was not joining in.

What the Greene King numbers describe is that contract quietly being rewritten. Not the death of the round, or the pub, or the cocktail. A 19% rise in demand for alcohol-free cocktails is not a story about people wanting less. It is a story about people wanting the same thing, minus one ingredient, and finally being able to get it in a decent glass at a fair price without a conversation about it.

The cocktail survived. The pub survived. The round survived. Alcohol just stopped being compulsory.

SOURCES: Greene King research published September 2026, based on a survey of 1,200 consumers conducted in summer 2026, reported by the Morning Advertiser and Hospitality & Catering News; Drinkaware Monitor 2025 and its alcohol-free and low-alcohol report, YouGov fieldwork, nationally representative, 2025 sample 7,256 adults; KAM x Everleaf venue audit, November 2024, and its 2026 follow-up. Correct as of 9 September 2026. If you are thinking about your own drinking, Drinkaware has free tools and advice. Please drink responsibly.