Earl Giles Restaurant & Distillery

Earl Giles Restaurant & Distillery in Northeast Minneapolis has a backwards origin story that makes it unusually well suited to this directory: the brand started in 2015 as a non-alcoholic elixir and mixer company, founded by hospitality veterans Jesse Held and Jeff Erkkila, and only later added a distillery. Most bars arrive at good zero-proof drinks by working backwards from cocktails. Earl Giles arrived at cocktails by working forwards from syrups, which is why the spirit-free side of the menu here reads as the original business rather than an accommodation. The name comes from Erkkila's great-grandfather, a Prohibition-era pilot who flew "medicine" across the northern United States.

The Logan Park venue runs to 18,000 square feet and pairs a full distillery and canning line with a wood-fired scratch kitchen and a Drinks Apothecary — a flavour lab holding more than six hundred globally sourced extracts. The room is anchored by a sixty-foot bar carved from a single Monkey Pod tree. Nearly the whole drinks programme is built on house-made syrups, elixirs and extracts, and the bar carries an extensive spirit-free menu alongside the cocktails rather than beneath them. Named zero-proof pours include a non-alcoholic Old Fashioned built on the house Good Trip NA spirit with black walnut molasses — a genuinely convincing version of a drink that is very hard to do without alcohol, because the sweetness and the wood have to come from somewhere — and the Paez, which combines yerba mate and jasmine with pineapple and coconut water. Given the depth of the extract library, it is also one of the few bars in the Twin Cities where asking the bartender to build something spirit-free to your taste is likely to produce something considered rather than a glass of juice. Open daily, from late morning at weekends.