Free Spirits Beverage Company

Free Spirits Beverage Company on North Curtis Road is Idaho's first alcohol-free bottle shop, and it arrived at that from an unusual direction. It started in 2018 as iOnE, a bitters manufacturer, and expanded into a full non-alcoholic beverage company in 2020 — so it makes things as well as selling them, producing its own line in-house without preservatives.

That manufacturing side is what separates it from most alcohol-free retail. Alongside national ranges like Ritual Zero Proof, the shelves carry its own shrub-based cocktail mixes: the smoky Luke Peary, the sweeter Cherry Chill. Shrubs are drinking vinegars, and they exist precisely to solve the central problem of alcohol-free drinks — without alcohol a drink tends to fall flat and sweet, and vinegar restores the acidity and length. A shop that makes its own rather than reselling someone else's understands the category from the inside.

The more important thing it does is organise. Since 2024 Free Spirits has run the Temperance Trail, a Dry January initiative built around a printable passport of eight alcohol-free stops at businesses across downtown Boise, with tasting events, educational classes and a closing party. It is now in its third year and kicks off with a citywide alcohol-free cocktail mix-off. Very few American cities have anything comparable, and the effect is visible in this guide: Boise's bars carry properly built zero-proof drinks at a rate you would expect from a much larger city, because somebody has spent three years making it normal.

The practical catch is the hours, which are genuinely restrictive: open only Thursday and Friday, noon to 6pm. It sits on the Boise Bench rather than downtown, so it is a deliberate trip. Check the website before setting out, and note that the shop moved here from an earlier North Orchard Street address. If you can only make one alcohol-free stop in Boise, make it this one — and if the timing does not work, the Temperance Trail passport in January is the other way in. The shop also runs events through the year beyond Dry January, so the January trail is the peak of the calendar rather than the whole of it.