Craft Lounge

Craft Lounge is on 11th Avenue South in Nampa, with a sibling location in nearby Caldwell, serving the western end of Idaho's Treasure Valley twenty-odd miles from downtown Boise.

Its two named alcohol-free drinks are a Non-Alcoholic Old Fashioned and a Virgin Mule, and the pairing is instructive because the two sit at opposite ends of difficulty. A Mule is easy: ginger beer and lime do nearly all the work and the vodka contributes almost nothing, so removing it costs very little. An Old Fashioned is the opposite and is arguably the hardest classic to attempt without alcohol. Strip it back and the drink is whiskey, sugar, bitters and ice — there is no citrus, no mixer, nothing to hide behind. Whatever stands in for the whiskey is fully exposed, which is why most bars will not attempt one.

Putting it on a printed menu is therefore a claim worth taking seriously, whether it is built on a non-alcoholic whiskey substitute or on tea, spice and bitters, which is the other common route. Either way somebody has spent time on it.

The practical value, as with The Sick Stag, is geographic. Nampa and Caldwell together hold well over a hundred and fifty thousand people, and the region's drinks writing barely acknowledges them. Two venues with named zero-proof options a few minutes apart mean a resident there has an actual choice on a given evening rather than one bar to hope is open. Hours are 3pm to 10pm through the week and to midnight on Friday and Saturday, closed Sundays. The Caldwell sibling extends the same offering a further ten minutes west, which is the closest thing the outer valley has to coverage.