Brunswick Aces

Opened as Australia's first permanent non-alcoholic bar and bottle shop, Brunswick Aces sits behind a working botanical distillery at 124 Weston Street in Brunswick East. Co-founders Stephen Lawrence and Cameron Hunt built custom stills to produce Sapiir, a gin-like zero-alcohol spirit; the distillery turns out roughly 3,000 litres of juniper-forward non-alcoholic infusions a week, with the Hearts Sapiir variety carrying notes of sweet citrus and native Australian wattleseed.

The bar's drinks list is anchored on that house spirit. The signature King Louis stirs Hearts Sapiir with coconut water and a cucumber-mint cordial, and the kitchen backs the cocktails with cheese and charcuterie boards. Beyond the house pours, the fridges and shelves stock non-alcoholic beer from Heaps Normal, plus zero-proof wine and spirits from Ovant (Margaret River), NON (Melbourne) and Gnista (Sweden), all available by the glass or bottle.

Attached to the bar is an in-house non-alcoholic bottle shop for taking product home, and the distillery door runs tours and cocktail masterclasses through the week. The bar itself trades Thursday to Saturday evenings from 5pm as walk-ins only, while the distillery door keeps daytime and later hours.

The venue has since reopened its doors to all drinkers, adding a small full-strength offering, but its whole reason for being - and the overwhelming majority of the menu - is the zero-proof program, making it the flagship alcohol-free destination in Melbourne.

The inversion is the entire point, and Time Out captures it neatly: at most bars a non-drinker is the minority, and at Brunswick Aces you are the majority. The bar stocks exactly one alcoholic drink — a single gin and tonic, kept as a wry nod to ordinary bars carrying one lemon, lime and bitters — and every other thing on the list is alcohol-free.

That makes the range far wider than a zero-proof section can ever be. Time Out lists non-alcoholic beer, wine and spirits from Heaps Normal XPA, Songbird, Ovant, GNISTA, NON and Vandestreek Playground IPA, with the wines available by the glass as well as the bottle — a detail that matters, because being unable to order one glass is what quietly pushes non-drinkers onto soft drinks everywhere else. The house also distils its own alcohol-free spirits, which are mixed with juices, extractions and syrups across the cocktail list. For anyone who has spent an evening reading a card looking for the one drink they can have, the experience of reading this one is the reason to make the trip to Brunswick.