BC Business
Mocktails founder Angela Hansen says her store is one of the top buyers of non-alcoholic drinks in the province
The scent of subtle, orange-tinged essential oil welcomes me into the space, which, I estimate, couldn’t comfortably fit more than 20 people. Amid plants hanging high and low, founder Angela Hansen stands behind a wooden counter that resembles a home bar, helping a customer check out their basketful of beverages.
Here, tucked into a small retail space across from Grandview Park on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, is Mocktails, the city’s first non-alcoholic liquor store.
The store’s shelves, cabinets and trolleys (many of them vintage) are packed with glassware and alcohol-free drinks, ranging from wine and beer to cocktails and spirits. Local products, like Nonny Beer and Edna’s, are easy to find.
On an earlier phone call, Leigh and Lane Matkovich—the brothers who launched Nonny—tell me that their brand is growing fast. It had spread from 200 stores in 2022 to over 400 by the end of 2023. Now you can find it in bars and breweries around B.C., at Michelin-starred restaurants like AnnaLena and Published on Main, at chains like Fresh St. Market and London Drugs and even at several liquor stores—not just the zero-proof ones.
When I ask about the inspiration behind the product, Lane says, “We’re both really big beer fans and we’re active people, but we realize that alcohol isn’t always a positive addition to the lifestyle that we’re looking for… So we selfishly created a brand that we wanted to see in the market and that we could use as a tool to moderate our alcohol intake.”
The pandemic could be res-ponsible for shifting attitudes toward health and alcohol, or it could be a natural shift in collective consciousness. In 2023, Health Canada updated its 2011 alcohol guidelines to specify that no amount of alcohol is safe and that any more than two drinks per week puts you at risk for cancer and other diseases.
But is the alcohol-free lifestyle a temporary fad?
As the Matkovich brothers embarked on their first entrepreneurial venture together (prior to this, Lane spent three years at Shopify and Leigh spent five at Vancouver’s Electric Bicycle Brewing), their own understanding of the term “non-alcoholic” started to evolve.
“The name Nonny comes from a slang term we used growing up to refer to non-alcoholic beers, and that was typically in a negative sense,” Lane explains. “We were skeptics before and now I think it’s a really important part of making that communal shift [away] from everything being very alcohol-centric.”
Similarly, Edna’s co-founder Nick Devine—who has been involved in the Vancouver bar and restaurant scene for decades with the Cascade Company, the group behind El Camino’s and Main Street Brewing—launched his alcohol-free cocktail brand in 2022 to fill a gap in the market.
“Non-alcoholic was a really underwhelming category,” he says. “I’d be in bars where the alcohol selection is enormous and then the non-alc is usually pop out of a soda gun. Really uninspiring.”
As more and more people in his life stopped drinking, Devine started experimenting with recipes for a virgin cocktail, ready-to-drink in a can. He opted for premium ingredients like organic cane sugar and spirit extract to create Edna’s, which goes for $16.99 for a four-pack. “And because I wasn’t fully convinced that the non-alc scene was going to go as crazy as it has, I deliberately made them full-flavoured so that they could be used as a mixer also,” he says.
Much to Devine’s relief, the change is palpable, with brands like Guinness, Peroni, Stella Artois and Tanqueray releasing alcohol-free versions of their beers and gin. (“When you see the big guys making these moves, you know something special is happening,” Devine notes.) Locally speaking, we’ve also got dry Duchess cocktails and Nevertheless beer by Strange Fellows Brewing, both of which sit on Mocktails’ shelves.
In Hansen’s string of customers, I overhear some mention abstinence (“I’m on day 23,” “Alcohol gives me heart palpitations”) as they thank her for opening Mocktails. When Hansen and I begin chatting, she tells me that the store is a one-woman show, and that she launched it to help people like herself, who quit drinking or are reducing their intake.
“Everyone deserves access to this stuff,” she says. “People who don’t drink or are sober-curious or are taking medications, pregnant women—it’s just so nice to have one shop to go to.”
And she’s had to order more products every few days: “According to people in the industry, we are one of the top buyers here, which is quite impressive for a store our size.” (As of press time, Mocktails has been open for three months.)
There are others like it in the province—Beevee’s in Port Coquitlam and Sobar in Kelowna—demonstrating a rising demand that the Matkovich brothers pointed to. An increasing number of establishments are seeking out brands like Nonny and Edna’s, with Devine reporting that the latter is in some 1,200 stores in B.C., including the Pattison Food Group (Save On Foods, Buy Low, Nesters), London Drugs and even Target in the U.S.
While I’m chatting with Hansen, another customer enters Mocktails. She helps him pick out some beer and he, too, thanks her for opening the store. She turns back to me with a smile.
“This hype around non-alc. Do you think it’s temporary?” I ask.
“Absolutely not,” she says. “I think there’s too much awareness for it to go backwards. And I think it’s just the start, that it’s actually going to grow.”
Sources: Statistics Canada, Nielsen IQ