In Good Spirits

In Good Spirits opened on 15 July 2023 at 858 N Ashland Avenue in West Town, and it is now the longest-running dedicated non-alcoholic shop in Chicago. It is owned by Adriana Gaspar and Hector Diaz, who came to it from inside the drinks industry — Diaz worked in beverage alcohol for nearly a decade, and Gaspar spent her career at marketing agencies representing major alcohol brands — and from personal reckonings that they have been open about. Gaspar stopped drinking after her father died of COVID-19 in late 2020; Diaz cut back after a kidney cancer diagnosis and surgery. They spent 2022 running sober pop-ups around the city before taking the Ashland storefront, which was designed by Points of Sail with furniture built by Rainbolt Productions, and the result is a shop that reads as a room to spend time in rather than a shelf of substitutes.

The range covers the full category rather than a corner of it — non-alcoholic beer, still and sparkling wine, zero-proof spirits, aperitifs and functional drinks — and the important structural detail is that you are not limited to taking it away. Anything on the shelf can be opened and drunk in the shop's community space, and the owners run a rotating menu of handmade cocktails alongside it, which makes this function as a bar as much as a bottle shop. That community-space framing is the stated point: the shop describes itself as a third space where connection can happen without alcohol present, and it programmes events accordingly. The Chicago Sun-Times, reporting on the city's sober-curious drinkers at the end of 2024, found business here rising year on year with holiday sales outpacing the previous season. Two practical notes. Opening hours are Wednesday through Sunday, closed Monday and Tuesday, and the shop occasionally posts adjusted hours that are worth checking before travelling. And alongside the strictly non-alcoholic stock the range includes hemp and functional products, so anyone avoiding all psychoactives will want to read labels or ask rather than assume everything on the shelf is inert.