Minus Moonshine (Greenpoint)

The second Minus Moonshine sits on the corner of Driggs Avenue and Eckford Street in Greenpoint, and it extends to north Brooklyn the model the original built in Prospect Heights from 2021: a shop that looks and works like a neighbourhood bottle shop, where every single bottle is alcohol-free.

Greenpoint is a well-chosen second address. It is the densest concentration of alcohol-free venues anywhere in New York — Soft Bar, the fully alcohol-free cafe and cocktail bar on Banker Street, is minutes away, and Rule of Thirds and the wider Greenpoint bar strip sit around it. Someone spending an evening in the neighbourhood without drinking has, unusually, a genuine choice of rooms and a shop to take something home from afterwards. That density is what a functioning alcohol-free scene actually looks like, and it exists in very few places.

The stock list is the one founder Aqxyl Storms has been building since 2021: non-alcoholic beer, wine, spirits, aperitifs, ready-to-drink cocktails, mixers and bitters, taking in Ghia, Seedlip, Kin Euphorics and Curious Elixirs among many others. The premise is the same as the original's — "drink what you love", meaning zero-proof versions of the drinks people genuinely miss, sold as drinks rather than as health products or as consolation.

Minus Moonshine is Queer, Trans-Nonbinary, Indigenous and Autistic owned. The shop opens seven days a week and offers same-day local delivery on orders placed online before 5pm, which is a practical detail worth knowing if you are hosting: the most common reason people end up serving nothing but soda to non-drinking guests is that they left the decision too late to find anything better.

For visitors, the useful framing is that this shop and its Prospect Heights sibling are not competing with each other but covering two different halves of Brooklyn — north and central — with Spirited Away covering Manhattan. Together they are the reason New York's non-alcoholic retail is the deepest in the country.