Non-Alcoholic Cocktail Bars in Burlington, VT
Craft cocktail bars and lounges in Burlington that take their non-alcoholic program seriously. Burlington's alcohol-free drinking is unusually well built for a city of 45,000, and the reason is that Vermont's producers got there first. Zero Gravity's Rescue Club line — an IPA and a pilsner, both under 0.5% — is brewed on Pine Street and poured at its own beer hall. Switchback installed a BrewVo de-alcoholisation system in January 2026 to bring Switchback N.A. production fully in-house, making its Flynn Avenue brewery the East Coast production site for the technology. Citizen Cider dealcoholises its flagship into The Clean Mayor, a true 0.0% cider with ginger and lemon. On the bar side the city is just as deliberate. The 126 prints its alcohol-free drinks as Temperance Cocktails, each named for a leader of the Temperance Movement, and makes every house syrup and bitters without alcohol so any of them can cross over. Devil Takes a Holiday calls its section atonements and builds them from bases made in-house. The Venetian Soda Lounge — a revival of a Burlington ginger ale brand lost during the Second World War — runs six zero-proof cocktails on CleanCo spirits alongside seven house sodas. And Mesmer Kava, Vermont's first kava bar, opened in the Karma Bird House in May 2025 as the one room in the state that keeps evening hours with no alcohol at all.
6 cocktail-style venues listed
Craft cocktail bars with NA programs
- ★★★★★?
Mesmer Kava is Vermont's first kava bar, opened in May 2025 by Gwen and Roderick Russell in Suite 109 of the Karma Bird House on Maple Street, a block from the Burlington waterfront. It serves traditionally prepared kava from the ground root of the South Pacific plant, plus kava drinks built with pineapple and ginger, herbal teas and kava-infused hot chocolate. Nothing on the menu contains alcohol, and it keeps genuine evening hours — 3pm to 8pm Wednesday through Saturday, from 4:30pm on Tuesday — which makes it the only room in the state offering a sit-down evening out with no alcohol in the building. Kava is mildly psychoactive, which the owners state plainly.
- ★★★★★?
The Venetian Soda Lounge is a 1920s-styled hideaway in Burlington's South End Arts District, built around a family soda recipe: Venetian Ginger Ale, a Burlington brand lost during the Second World War and revived in 2017. The lounge opened on Pine Street in 2022 and prints a full Zero Proof mocktails section — six drinks at $9 to $12, three of them built on CleanCo's alcohol-free gin and whiskey — alongside seven house-made craft sodas at $5, soda floats, creemees and milkshakes. It serves alcohol too, but it is the rare licensed room where the non-alcoholic side is the founding idea rather than an accommodation. Live jazz, low light, closed Monday and Tuesday.
Signature NA drinks- The Clean Getaway — CleanCo alcohol-free gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, chilled coupe
- Yes-groni — Amaro Lucano non-alcoholic, CleanCo alcohol-free gin, white grape juice, orange
- Perp on Maple — CleanCo alcohol-free whiskey, maple cream syrup, bitters, seltzer
- Green Light Mule — lemon juice, mint, Venetian Ginger Ale, bitters
- Mr. White in the Kitchen — smoked rosemary grapefruit syrup, lime, tonic
- ★★★★★?
The 126 is a downtown cocktail bar on College Street whose alcohol-free drinks are printed as Temperance Cocktails — a deliberate joke, each one named after a leader of the Temperance Movement that brought in Prohibition, including a Carrie the Hatchet built in tribute to Carrie Nation. The structural decision behind the section is more interesting than the naming: the bar makes every house syrup and every batch of bitters without alcohol, so any drink on the list can be built alcohol-free without substitution or compromise. Co-owner Emily Morton insists on the Temperance label over the word mocktail. Open Tuesday to Saturday from 5pm, closed Sunday and Monday.
- ★★★★★?
Devil Takes a Holiday is a dark, demon-themed cocktail lounge on St Paul Street in downtown Burlington, run by Taylor Watts, who styles himself Head Devil. Its alcohol-free drinks are printed as atonements — a standing section of the rotating menu rather than an off-list favour — and they are built the way the alcoholic cocktails are, from bases, shrubs and syrups the bar makes itself. Watts has demonstrated the approach publicly on Vermont Public, showing a spiced cranberry shrub finished with non-alcoholic sparkling wine and a hot buttered drink built on a cocoa-and-brown-sugar scrub. Open from 5pm most nights, 4pm on Friday and Saturday, with a Sunday afternoon service.
- ★★★★★?
Doma Bar is a lesbian-owned and QPOC-operated cocktail bar on Pine Street in Burlington's South End Arts District, opened as a deliberate counterweight to venues that ask people to hustle, mask, perform and optimise. It keeps beer, wine and zero-proof drinks on hand at all times and runs a large non-alcoholic menu rather than a token pair of options — a policy choice that follows directly from the room's premise, since a bar built around belonging cannot make a third of its guests order soda. Open Tuesday to Saturday from 5pm, to midnight at weekends, closed Sunday and Monday.
- ★★★★★?
Bar Renée is a natural wine bar and bottle shop on Main Street in downtown Burlington, pouring low-intervention wines from Vermont and further afield with no additives. Its list deliberately runs past wine into the adjacent categories — ciders, co-ferments and a curated selection of non-alcoholic drinks — which makes it one of the few places in the city where someone not drinking is choosing between several interesting bottles rather than between soda and water. Snacks run to charcuterie, local cheese, tinned fish, olives and almonds. Open from noon to 10pm most days and to 11pm on Friday and Saturday, closed Tuesday, and no reservations.
Other bars in Burlington with serious NA programs
These aren't classified as cocktail bars, but their NA programs are extensive enough to be worth a stop.
What separates a good NA cocktail bar from the rest?
A great non-alcoholic cocktail bar isn't defined by whether it stocks Seedlip on the shelf. It's defined by whether the bartenders treat alcohol-free drinks as cocktails — built with the same logic, the same balance, the same care for mouthfeel and presentation as the alcoholic side of the menu.
The signal: a printed NA section on the menu with named drinks, an NA-spirits row on the back bar (Lyre's, Seedlip, Wilderton, Ritual, sometimes Monday Zero Alcohol Gin or Wilderton Lustre), house-made shrubs and bitters available for NA builds, and staff who can talk through what's in a drink without defaulting to "we can do something with juice."
The opposite: a generic "mocktail" line item priced at $8 with no description, or worse, a Shirley Temple by default. We rank cocktail-style venues here by NA Program Strength and lead with the venues that have published named NA drinks on their menu.
Frequently asked about NA cocktail bars in Burlington
6 cocktail-style bars in Burlington run non-alcoholic programs we've verified. Top picks include Mesmer Kava, The Venetian Soda Lounge, The 126.
New venues in your area
Tell us where you are and we'll email you when we add or verify a great non-alcoholic spot near you. About one short email a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.