Sober October in Sacramento: Where to Drink Alcohol-Free

Root of Happiness Kava Bar's Midtown room opened in March 2023 in a warehouse space on the R Street Corridor, the newest of four Northern California locations run by Travis Lowin and Tyler Blythe, who started the company in Rancho Cordova around 2013. Nothing alcoholic is served. The bar prepares noble kava only, ground fresh and hand-prepared each day from fresh-frozen root sourced in Hawaii, Fiji and the company's own American farms, and serves it traditionally in shells alongside a house specialty coffee programme built on its Bula Blend and a list of functional botanical drinks and iced tonic pours. Kava is a psychoactive root drink from the South Pacific — alcohol-free, but sedating and intoxicating in its own right, which is why the bar serves it only to guests 18 and over with ID while keeping the coffee and botanical menu open to all ages. The room runs daily from 11am to 1am, with spray-painted street art across the walls, pink neon over the bar and regular live music.

The Rancho Cordova room is where Root of Happiness began: Travis Lowin and Tyler Blythe opened it around 2013, which puts it ahead of the first kava bars in Berkeley and New York and makes it one of the older continuously operating kava bars in the continental United States. It is fully alcohol-free. The kava is noble root only, ground fresh and hand-prepared daily from fresh-frozen root sourced in Hawaii, Fiji and the company's own American farms, served traditionally in shells, with a specialty coffee list built on the house Bula Blend and a range of functional botanical drinks alongside. Kava is a psychoactive South Pacific root drink — no alcohol, but genuinely sedating — so the bar restricts it to guests 18 and over with ID while keeping coffee and botanicals open to all ages. Fifteen miles east of downtown Sacramento, it serves a suburban regular crowd rather than a night-out one, and runs 11am to 1am daily.

The Davis branch of Root of Happiness sits on F Street in the downtown grid, minutes from the UC Davis campus, and runs 11am to 1am seven days a week — a rare late alcohol-free option in a university town where the alternative is a bar crowd. Root of Happiness has traded since 2006 and describes itself as the original California kava bar, now six rooms across Northern California; two of them, in Midtown Sacramento and Rancho Cordova, are already listed here. The group's focus from the start has been sourcing: identifying exceptional kava from across the Pacific and building reliable ways to evaluate its quality. No alcohol is served, and no kratom appears on the published menu.

The Roseville branch of Root of Happiness sits on Vernon Street in the middle of the town's revitalised downtown, and like the rest of the group it runs 11am to 1am every day of the week with no alcohol served. It covers the Placer County side of the Sacramento metro — Roseville, Rocklin and Granite Bay — where dedicated alcohol-free rooms are otherwise absent entirely. The group has traded since 2006, calls itself the original California kava bar, and built its reputation on sourcing exceptional kava from across the Pacific and evaluating it systematically. No kratom appears on the published menu, which sets it apart from most American kava operators.

The Teetotalist is Sacramento's first alcohol-free bar and social club, operating out of the Jungle Room at Propagate in Midtown — a plant shop and event space that hosts it rather than a licensed bar making room. Nothing it pours contains alcohol, and the framing is deliberately social rather than therapeutic: it exists so that people who do not drink, for any reason at all, have somewhere to go together. It runs as a residency and event programme rather than a nightly bar, including Dry January pop-ups, so check the current schedule before making the trip. Google lists no fixed hours for it, which reflects that reality rather than any doubt about the venue.