Better Beverage

Better Beverage is Mary LaPlaca's non-alcoholic bottle shop, run out of Westerville and serving the wider Columbus area. It is alcohol-free in the strict sense — there is no beer-and-wine section behind the zero-proof end cap, because the whole inventory is zero-proof. What it does not have is a shopfront. Instead the business operates as a pop-up and delivery model: LaPlaca runs stalls at markets and events, pours tastings, staffs alcohol-free bars at private functions, delivers locally, and sells wholesale to bars, restaurants and retailers that want to build a non-alcoholic list without sourcing case by case. Orders are placed by email rather than through a checkout.

The curation is the point of difference. Rather than stocking by category alone, LaPlaca selects ready-to-drink brands on ownership and practice — women-owned, LGBTQ+-owned, veteran-owned, minority-owned, family-owned, or run to a sustainability standard — which produces a list weighted towards smaller independent producers rather than the large drinks groups that dominate non-alcoholic shelf space in supermarkets. The founding story is stated plainly on the shop's own site: LaPlaca describes how Al-Anon changed her life, and how she brought a twenty-year career as an artist to bear when she noticed that Columbus, unlike comparable cities, had no dedicated non-alcoholic shop at all. For a city whose only bricks-and-mortar zero-proof retail is an aisle inside a grocer, a specialist operator willing to come to the event is a meaningful part of the picture — though it does mean checking the pop-up schedule rather than turning up at an address. Practically, the way to buy from Better Beverage is to watch where it will be. The shop posts its pop-up and event schedule to Instagram, takes delivery and wholesale orders by email rather than through a checkout, and pours tastings at markets and private functions — which, for a category as variable in quality as non-alcoholic spirits and wines, is more useful than any product description. The wholesale and distributor arm is the quieter half of the operation, supplying bars, restaurants and retailers that want to build an alcohol-free list without sourcing brand by brand. Anyone planning around it should treat it as a schedule to check rather than a shop to visit.