Louie's Cocktail Lounge

Louie's Cocktail Lounge sits on Mather Field Road in Rancho Cordova, a suburb east of Sacramento near the former air force base. It is a neighbourhood lounge rather than a cocktail destination, and its alcohol-free offering is straightforward: three non-alcoholic beers — Heineken 0.0, Michelob Ultra 0.0 and Corona Cero — plus Shirley Temples, virgin margaritas and virgin piña coladas.

The drinks are ordinary and this listing does not pretend otherwise. What is not ordinary is the schedule: 6am to 2am, seven days a week. Twenty hours a day, every day.

That deserves attention because of who it serves. Almost everything written about alcohol-free drinking assumes a particular customer — someone choosing between cocktail bars on a Friday evening. It does not describe the nurse coming off a night shift, the construction crew finishing at seven in the morning, the person whose social hours simply are not the same as everyone else's. Those people also stop drinking, and when they do, the entire published landscape of thoughtful mocktail menus is closed.

A lounge open at six in the morning with three cold non-alcoholic beers in the fridge is not competing with Kupros or Juju. It is covering hours that nothing else in this guide touches, for people the category tends to overlook entirely. Stocking three different NA beers rather than one also suggests actual demand rather than a token gesture.

Rancho Cordova is about fifteen minutes east of downtown, well outside the Midtown cluster, which extends the geographic reach of this guide further still.

It is also worth noting what three NA beers on one back bar implies. Stocking a single Heineken 0.0 is what a distributor pushes; stocking Heineken, Michelob Ultra Zero and Corona Cero side by side means somebody looked at what was selling and reordered. Neighbourhood bars do not carry redundant stock for image. The likeliest explanation is that a reliable number of regulars are drinking them, which says something about how far the shift away from alcohol has travelled outside the places that write about it.