Alcohol-Free Things to Do in Savannah

Kava House is Savannah's first kava and nootropic tea café, a locally and veteran-owned room on Bull Street in Thomas Square that serves no alcohol at all. The bar pours traditional kava, kratom and a range of botanical and functional teas, with a short kitchen list of ramen, baked goods, mochi donuts and house chocolate alongside. It is 18-and-over and open 9am to 8pm seven days a week, closing at 6:30pm on Sundays — hours that matter, because they cover the early evening when almost every other alcohol-free option in Savannah has already shut. Kava is mildly psychoactive and kratom is served here too, so this is a night out without alcohol rather than a substance-free room.

Alley Cat Lounge is a basement cocktail bar reached from Broughton Lane, the service alley behind Savannah's main shopping street, in an 1870s brick cellar. Its menu is a newsprint broadsheet — the Alley Cat Rag — reissued in numbered editions with the whole list rewritten each time, and the bar's standing commitment is that whatever the edition, it carries a minimum of ten low- and no-alcohol cocktails alongside alcohol-free beer and cider. That is the deepest running alcohol-free selection of any licensed bar in the city. It is open from 4pm to 1am Monday through Thursday, to 2am on Friday and Saturday, and closed Sundays.

ARCO is a cocktail lounge and coastal-seafood room set inside an 1860 Victorian building on Bay Street, entered off Factor's Walk and framed by the brick arches and vaults that give it its name, with the Savannah River below. It is part of the Ele & the Chef restaurant collection. The cocktail menu is organised into four named categories — Classics, Signature, Light and Moderate, and Non-Alcoholic — so the alcohol-free drinks are a standing section of the list rather than a request, and the low-ABV tier sits between them for anyone moderating rather than abstaining. The room opens in the late afternoon and runs to 10pm, or 11pm on Fridays.

Bar Julian is the rooftop bar on top of Thompson Savannah in the Eastern Wharf development, the tallest roof in the city, looking straight down the Savannah River. Its cocktail list prints a section headed Booze-Free carrying four drinks between $12 and $14, all built on non-alcoholic spirits — a zero-proof agave, a zero-proof London dry, Lyre's cane spirit and a zero-proof aperitif — rather than assembled from juices. The kitchen is Mediterranean-leaning and shareable, and the bar keeps unusually long hours for Savannah, opening at 7am for coffee and running to 11pm, or midnight on Friday and Saturday.

Peregrin is the rooftop bar on top of the Perry Lane Hotel, an all-weather open-air lounge with a year-round pool, tropical planting and long views over the Historic District. Its drinks list carries a section headed simply MOCKTAILS, four drinks at a flat $12, and every one is built on a named non-alcoholic spirit rather than juice and syrup: Seedlip Garden and Grove, Lyre's alcohol-free brut and aperitivo, Giffard's non-alcoholic elderflower. The beer list adds Athletic Brewing golden ale and IPA at $8. It is open from 11am to 11pm daily, to midnight on Friday and Saturday, which makes it one of the few good zero-proof lists in Savannah available in daylight.

Repeal 33 is a bar and restaurant on Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, named for the amendment that ended Prohibition and built around an inventive cocktail programme run by beverage director Jim McCourt. Its non-alcoholic drinks are treated as part of that programme rather than as a fallback: Savannah's tourism board singles the room out specifically for them, describing four distinct builds that include one on a non-alcoholic botanical distillate with lemon and basil and another on an alcohol-free aperitif syrup with orange and soda. The kitchen runs dinner from 4pm every day, with weekend brunch from 11am on Saturday and Sunday.

Water Witch Tiki is a 21-and-over tiki bar in the Starland District, a dark, densely decorated room on Bull Street that takes its rum programme seriously and applies the same thinking to the drinks without any. Its menu carries a standing Non-Alcoholic section of four builds at $8 to $9, made with the same house syrups, shrubs and proprietary bitters as everything else — chamomile and green cardamom, tamarind-mango-mint purée, blueberry shrub, a Sichuan-hibiscus bitters the bar makes itself. Three Athletic Brewing alcohol-free beers sit in the cans list at $7. It opens at 5pm midweek and 11am on Friday and Saturday, and closes on Sundays.

Savoy Society occupies the ground floor of Drayton Tower, the mid-century modernist apartment block on Liberty Street, and runs as a late-night bar and small-plates kitchen with a terrace. Its cocktail list is built on house ingredients — yaupon tea, house cordials, its own bitters — and the same components carry a handful of alcohol-free drinks, among them a spirit-free take on an old-fashioned made with yaupon tea and sugar bitters, a carrot, pineapple, coconut and lime colada, and a cold-brew-and-coconut build lengthened with tonic. It trades from mid-afternoon to midnight, later at weekends, and closes on Tuesdays.

The Perch is the rooftop bar above Local 11ten Food & Wine, a fine-dining room on Bull Street just south of Forsyth Park, set among the oak canopy rather than above a skyline. It runs a small seasonal cocktail list that has consistently included built alcohol-free drinks made from house shrubs and syrups — a strawberry-habanero shrub with basil and lime, a cucumber-and-lime shrub with cilantro and ginger syrup, a honeysuckle-and-white-pepper build with mint and lemon. Because the list turns over with the seasons and the roof only trades Thursday to Sunday evenings, weather permitting, it is worth checking what is current before making the trip.