The non-alcoholic drinks world spent its early years in Melbourne making the same mistake: trying to replicate the flavour of alcohol without understanding that what people were mourning was not ethanol but complexity. A non-alcoholic gin substitute that tastes vaguely botanical but lacks the textural grip and aromatic depth of spirit is not a solution — it is a polite disappointment, and it explains why the first wave of NA products failed to penetrate serious hospitality. What Melbourne’s current NA culture understands, and what separates its best practitioners from the category’s also-rans, is that the question is not how to simulate a glass of Sauvignon Blanc or a Negroni. The question is how to make something genuinely excellent — complex, layered, engaging across the length of a meal — that does not require alcohol to achieve any of those qualities.
The connection between Melbourne’s NA culture and its coffee and natural wine scenes is not coincidental. The same obsessive attention to ingredient sourcing, the same curiosity about fermentation and botanical extraction, the same instinct to treat flavour as a technical and philosophical problem rather than a sensory convenience — these dispositions that built Melbourne’s specialty coffee infrastructure and its inner-north natural wine culture are now being applied to the non-alcoholic category. The producers working seriously in this space are not health-industry entrepreneurs. They are the same people who spent years arguing about water mineralogy and malolactic fermentation. The shift to NA production is, for them, the same argument in a new register.
The resulting culture is distinctly Melbourne in its seriousness. The ferments, the shrubs, the verjuice-based cocktails, the sapiir and botanical spirits, the NA pairings at Attica and Brae — these are not consolation prizes for non-drinkers. They are, at their best, the most interesting drinking in the city.
Brunswick Aces
The most concentrated expression of Melbourne’s NA project is Brunswick Aces, which began as Australia’s first dedicated non-alcoholic bar and has evolved into a bar and distillery that serves both alcoholic and non-alcoholic options, with the NA side still setting the agenda. The space on Weston Street in Brunswick East is designed without apology — there is no sense of cafeteria minimalism or medical sobriety in the fit-out. It is a proper bar: plush furniture, gilded frames, moody florals, the specific warm-dark atmosphere of a room designed for the pleasure of sitting and drinking something interesting.
The signature product is sapiir — Brunswick Aces’ own non-alcoholic distilled spirit, built on native Australian botanicals including lemon myrtle, Tasmanian pepperberry, and wattleseed, with juniper for the gin-adjacent reference point. The result is not a gin substitute in any meaningful sense; it is something that occupies the same functional position as gin in a cocktail but has a character entirely its own. The native botanicals give it an aromatic profile that has no European equivalent, and the absence of alcohol changes the palate weight in a way that requires adjusting the cocktail recipe rather than simply swapping one liquid for another.
The bar’s cocktail menu extends beyond the sapiir: zero-alcohol wines from Songbird and McGuigan, botanical drinks from Swedish producer Gnista, the full range of Non (a Melbourne-made NA spirit range), and a programme of fermented and shrub-based drinks that reflect the kitchen’s interest in what non-alcoholic complexity can look like when it does not reference spirit production at all. The meet-the-maker sessions and cocktail masterclasses are worth attending even if you are a regular drinker — the technical explanation of how NA complexity is built is more interesting than most drinks education available in the city.
124 Weston St, Brunswick East. brunswickaces.com
NA Pairings at Attica and Brae
The appearance of non-alcoholic pairing programmes at Attica and Brae — two of the most serious restaurants in the country — is a qualitative signal that the category has moved past novelty. Both kitchens are obsessive about flavour in the way that produces interesting non-alcoholic drinks: they are engaged with fermentation, with botanical extraction, with the interaction between a specific liquid and a specific dish, and they approach the NA pairing as a culinary problem rather than an accommodation.
At Attica, Ben Shewry’s kitchen has developed a NA pairing programme that draws on the same native Australian ingredient vocabulary as the food menu: shrubs made from Kakadu plum, ferments based on native botanicals, verjuices from Australian grape varieties, and preparations that are more closely related to the kitchen’s fermentation programme than to the commercial NA spirits industry. The pairing is designed to amplify specific elements in each course — a fermented saltbush liquid alongside the dish that uses saltbush, a sour native fruit shrub alongside the richest protein course — in the same way that a wine pairing is designed to create moments of convergence and contrast.
At Brae, the NA pairing reflects the farm’s own fermentation infrastructure. Hunter’s kitchen has an extensive programme of lacto-fermented vegetables, fruit vinegars, and preserved liquids that are produced from the farm’s own harvest, and some of these appear in the NA pairing alongside more conventional shrub and juice preparations. Drinking the NA pairing at Brae while eating the farm’s own produce is, in a sense, drinking the farm — the same ingredients appearing in different forms across the plate and the glass.
Both restaurants offer the NA pairing as an alternative to the wine programme, at a price that reflects the genuine labour involved in producing drinks of this complexity without alcohol’s natural preservation and concentration mechanisms.
The Ferments and Shrubs: The Restaurant’s Own Language
Beyond the dedicated NA producers and the tasting-menu pairings, Melbourne’s NA culture is also visible in the ferment and shrub programmes that have become standard equipment in the city’s serious restaurants and wine bars. Embla, whose natural wine list is one of the best in the city, also maintains a house ferment programme that produces drinking vinegars, tepache (fermented pineapple), and kombucha-adjacent preparations that appear on the menu as non-alcoholic cocktail components.
The logic of the shrub — a fruit or botanical macerated in vinegar and sugar, then mixed with sparkling water — is one of the oldest forms of non-alcoholic drinks complexity, predating the modern cocktail culture by centuries. Its reappearance in Melbourne’s serious restaurant culture reflects a genuine interest in what fermented acidity does to the palate in the same way that wine’s acidity cleans and refreshes across a long meal. A well-made shrub is not a substitute for wine — it is doing a different job, and it does that job well.
The Lune Croissanterie’s coffee-adjacent drinks — cold brew, shrubs, fermented fruit drinks — represent the category’s morning expression: complex, non-alcoholic, genuinely worth thinking about in the way that a good coffee is worth thinking about. This is the extension of the same sensibility that built the city’s coffee culture into a form of connoisseurship.
On Drinking Without Drinking Seriously
The three-tier assessment for any NA product. First: does it have genuine complexity — more than two or three flavour notes? Second: does it hold interest across the full glass, or does it peak immediately and then flatten? Third: does it do something positive for the meal — amplifying, contrasting, refreshing — or is it merely neutral? Most commercial NA products fail the third test. The best pass all three.
The NA pairing at Brae and Attica is not a consolation. Order it if you are curious, even if you would normally drink wine. The conversation between the kitchen’s fermentation intelligence and the food is the same conversation as the wine pairing, in a different language.
At Brunswick Aces: resist the impulse to order the most spirit-adjacent thing. The sapiir cocktails are excellent, but the house fermented drinks — the things with no obvious spirit reference — are where the bar’s real argument lives.
The serious NA drinker needs a vocabulary. The same vocabulary that the natural wine world uses — acidity, tannin, texture, length, structure — applies to excellent NA drinks. Begin using it. It changes what you notice.
This is not a temporary accommodation. The most interesting development in Melbourne’s drinks culture in the past decade is not a new fermented grape region or a new distillation technique. It is the emergence of a non-alcoholic drinks culture with genuine intellectual ambition. This is what the city’s ingredient obsession produces when it is applied to a new problem, and it is, characteristically, more serious than the surrounding noise suggests.