Minus Moonshine (Prospect Heights)

Minus Moonshine opened on Sterling Place in Prospect Heights in 2021, which makes it one of the earliest dedicated zero-proof package shops in New York City and, alongside Spirited Away in Chelsea, one of the two anchors of non-alcoholic retail in the five boroughs. Founder Aqxyl Storms built it to read like a neighbourhood liquor store from the street — shelves, bottles, the ordinary furniture of a place that sells drink — with the single difference that nothing in it contains meaningful alcohol.

That design choice is the whole argument. A great deal of non-alcoholic retail presents itself as wellness: pale packaging, adaptogen language, the visual grammar of a supplement shop. Minus Moonshine deliberately does not. The shop's own premise is "drink what you love" — non-alcoholic whiskey, wine and aperitivo for people who miss those specific things, rather than substitutes framed as a compromise or a health decision. For a lot of people who have stopped drinking, being sold a wellness product is its own small indignity; being sold a good bottle is not.

The range covers NA beer, wine, spirits, aperitifs, mixers, bitters and the shop's adaptogenic "potions", with the category's established names — Ghia, Seedlip, Kin Euphorics, Curious Elixirs — alongside non-alcoholic wines and CBD and adaptogen spritzers. It is a genuinely browsable selection rather than a token shelf, which matters because the category's prices are high enough that a blind purchase can put someone off the whole idea.

The shop is Queer, Trans-Nonbinary, Indigenous and Autistic owned, and its ownership is not incidental to how it operates: sobriety and sober-curiosity cut across communities that conventional bar culture has often served badly, and a shop run from inside those communities reads differently to the people in them.

A second Minus Moonshine trades in Greenpoint at 257 Driggs Avenue, also listed in this guide. Between the two of them and Spirited Away, a New Yorker can now buy good non-alcoholic drink in person, from someone who can answer questions about it, in three different parts of the city — which was true of nowhere in America a decade ago.