Sober October in Indianapolis: Where to Drink Alcohol-Free

16-Bit is a 21-and-over retro arcade bar on East New York Street downtown, where the cabinet games are free to play and the money is made at the bar. That model happens to make it one of the easier nights out in Indianapolis for someone who is not drinking, because the reason to be there is the arcade rather than the round. The non-alcoholic list is longer than most bars manage and every drink is named in the same register as the cocktails: Kissed By A Rose is built on Seedlip Garden 108 with hibiscus, lemon, rose and mint, Gym Class Zero runs desert pear with lime and tonic, and Pinky and the Brain, Optimus Prime and Lisa Simpson fill out the simpler end.

The Ball & Biscuit opened on Massachusetts Avenue in June 2010 and is generally credited as Indiana's first craft cocktail bar. It was founded by local attorney Trevor Belden with bartender Zach Wilks, who later left to build the Wilks & Wilson syrup line, and takes its name from the 1930s ribbon microphone nicknamed the ball and biscuit — vintage mics and music gear are part of the fit-out. For a bar of that vintage the non-alcoholic list is unusually developed: seven named zero-proof drinks stand alongside the full-proof menu rather than in a footnote, including the Spritz AF built on Lyre's Italian Orange and Aperitif Rosso with Fre sparkling brut, the Twist of Fate, the New Fashioned and the floral Whole Garden.

The Fountain Room is a Wisconsin-style supper club in the Bottleworks District, opened in the summer of 2022 by the father-and-son restaurant team Perry and Blake Fogelsong after a pandemic-era trip north. The room is Art Deco jazz-age — velvet banquettes, chandeliers, a reel-to-reel machine — and OpenTable and People named it one of America's fifty most beautiful restaurants. The food is supper-club canon: pickled relish trays, prime rib, house desserts. Non-alcoholic drinks get their own printed "No ABV" section rather than a line at the bottom of the cocktail list, running to the Crouching Tiger, Circle City Sober, a Cherry Burlesque built on cherry, lime, honey syrup, ginger beer and mint, and an alcohol-removed Sauvignon Blanc by the glass.

Cannon Ball Lounge sits six floors up on the roof of Hotel Indy on East Washington Street, and is the only indoor-outdoor rooftop bar downtown — which matters in a city with four distinct seasons. It is named for Erwin "Cannonball" Baker, the Indianapolis motorcyclist who rode in the first Indianapolis 500 and set transcontinental records for decades afterwards, and the drinks list leans on local reference points throughout. The non-alcoholic drinks are a printed zero-proof section rather than an afterthought: I Miss My Spritz is built on DHOS Bittersweet Aperitif and non-alcoholic sparkling wine, Good Graces runs lemon, guava and honey against New Orleans non-alcoholic bitters and ginger beer, and the Tail of Thyme uses a house plum-lavender syrup.

The Inferno Room is a tiki bar on Virginia Avenue in Fountain Square, opened on 11 September 2018 by longtime tiki collector Ed Rudisell with his wife Sasatorn Rudisell and partner Chris Coy, in a building that once held a Marion County courthouse. It holds what the bar describes as one of the largest collections of Papua New Guinea art outside a museum, split across the Kahuna Lounge and the Luau Room. The non-alcoholic drinks are printed as their own MOCKTAILS section of the cocktail menu at $10 each — the Coocoonut Grove, The Way to Eden and Veiled Virtues — built to the same tropical, layered spec as the rum drinks rather than reduced to fruit juice.

BODHI is a 21-and-over Thai craft cocktail bar and bistro at the far end of Massachusetts Avenue, run by Taelor Carmine alongside her mother Nicky Carmine and grandmother Pen Phojanasupan, both of whom spent years in Thai restaurant kitchens. It is women-owned and family-run, with a pan-Thai menu built from recipes passed down through the three of them. The bar treats zero-proof as a build rather than a substitution: the Water Lily Dessert layers Lyre's Dry London Spirit and Fre Rosé over coconut water, strawberry shrub, lychee jelly and soda, and the rotating Secret Garden leans on seasonal fruit and vegetables. Seedlip appears in the seasonal list. The kitchen closes an hour before the bar does.

SKOSH opened on Shelby Street in Garfield Park on 14 November 2023 and describes itself as Indy's first SlowBar — a room built around coffee, tea and zero-proof cocktails at a deliberately unhurried pace, with baked goods, live music and a floor of furniture, art and home decor that is all for sale. It is fully alcohol-free. Founder Haley Hilts runs the interior design practice Authentique Design Collective, which explains the fit-out: 1,600 square feet of vintage furnishings and modern pieces arranged so that everything you sit on can be bought. Coffee comes from Illumine Coffee Co., and the drinks list runs to wellness shots, tea and named non-alcoholic builds such as the Fringe, a garden margarita.

Sundry & Vice is an apothecary-themed cocktail bar inside the Bottleworks Hotel at the top of Massachusetts Avenue, opened on 23 October 2021 as the second location of the Cincinnati bar of the same name in Over-the-Rhine. The fit-out runs to pharmacy cabinetry, tincture bottles and a soda-fountain sensibility, and the program is built on house-made syrups, freshly squeezed juice and cocktails on draft. That component-driven approach is why the zero-proof drinks work: The Young and the Spiritless layers Spiritless non-alcoholic bourbon with pineapple, cinnamon, orgeat, plum bitters, mint and ginger beer, and 24 Carrot Magic builds Seedlip Grove over carrot, lemon, pineapple, black pepper and ginger.

8th Day is a small-batch distillery, bottle shop and cocktail bar in the Circle City Industrial Complex on the Near Eastside, run by Matt and Jaime Lamping. They signed the lease in 2015 and began filling bourbon barrels, launched gin and rum into Indianapolis bars and shops, and opened the bottle shop and cocktail bar to the public in 2018. The room is deliberately living-room-ish, with a new local artist's work shown every quarter and regular pop-ups with other Indianapolis businesses. Mocktails sit on the rotating seasonal menu alongside the cocktails as a matter of course — the Overalls. is lemon with a lavender-thyme simple syrup and soda water.

Sun King is Indianapolis's largest independent brewery, founded in 2009, and its original downtown taproom sits on North College Avenue in the Cole-Noble district. It is on this list because it brews its own non-alcoholic beer rather than stocking someone else's: the N/A Sunlight Cream Ale is an alcohol-free version of Sunlight, the award-winning flagship, at under 0.5% ABV and available year-round. Visit Indy counts two Sun King brews reimagined without alcohol alongside guest zero-proof beers and four classic mocktails at the taproom. One caution worth knowing before you go: Sun King also cans hemp-derived THC seltzers under its Sun King Hemp line, and those are sold in the same room.