Cheeky & Dry

Cheeky & Dry is the shop Kirstin Vracko wished existed, and she has said so in exactly those words. She and her husband Yura opened it in November 2023 in a 750-square-foot storefront on Phinney Ave N, and the reason is not a marketing story: her husband went to rehab for alcohol use, she stopped drinking in solidarity with him, and — as she told KNKX — he went in, she stopped drinking, they both felt ten times better, and she was left looking for products that would get her through, wanting to go through the ritual of having a cocktail at night. What she found instead, in the shop's own phrase, was sad seltzers, overly sweet pretend drinks and a serious lack of options that felt grown-up. The store opened into immediate demand. The line stretched eighteen deep on one January day, and Vracko told the Seattle Times that since the moment they opened it had been busy every day, not just Dry January. The Seattle Times' description is the useful one for finding it: it looks like just another hipsterish natural wine shop unless you read the zero-proof fine print on the labels.

The rule here is refreshingly absolute — every bottle in the shop is 0.5% ABV or less — and the range is organised like a real drinks retailer rather than a novelty aisle: non-alcoholic gin and botanicals, whiskey, rum and bourbon alternatives, agave spirits, aperitivos and digestivos, still and sparkling wines, wine alternatives, beer, ready-to-drink cocktails, mixers and bitters. Roughly 250 products, with Pathfinder, Three Spirit, Little Saints, Parch, Aplos, Free Spirits, Leilo and the amaro-style Opius among them, and a counter where you can taste before committing — which matters more in this category than in any other, because a bad non-alcoholic bottle is expensive and undrinkable. One thing to know if you are avoiding all intoxicants rather than only alcohol. We read the entire catalogue and found no THC in it anywhere, which is unusual and to the shop's credit. It does stock kava — several products, including a concentrated kava spirit — one elixir that combines kava with kratom and is marked 18-and-over, and one coffee infused with 25mg of CBD per serving. Everything is labelled; just read past the ABV.