Modern World

Modern World is a dedicated non-alcoholic bottle shop at 1006 W 36th Street, on the Avenue in Hampden, opened in early 2024 by Laurie Hefner — a Minneapolis native who came up through hospitality and natural wine before deciding Baltimore needed somewhere to buy this category properly. Her framing of who it is for is deliberately wide, and worth repeating because it explains the shop's tone: she built it for everybody to explore fun things to enjoy themselves and share with other people, rather than as a resource aimed only at people who have stopped drinking. Baltimore Magazine has described it since as a bright non-alcoholic bottle shop, and it has become the reference point for the category in the city.

Everything on the shelves is 0.5% ABV or less. The range covers zero-proof spirits, hop waters and non-alcoholic beers, with canned cocktails from St. Agrestis and kombucha-style bottles from Unified Ferments among the products that move fastest — Unified in particular is a producer more often found in restaurant cellars than on retail shelves, and its presence is a fair signal of how the buying is done here. Around the drinks sit tinned fish, potato chips and glassware, which makes it a shop you can put a whole evening together in rather than just a bottle run. Two practical notes. It is retail: no source, including the shop's own site, describes any seating or on-site tasting, so plan to take what you buy elsewhere. And the shop still trades on a raw Shopify subdomain rather than its own web address, and posts holiday changes to Google and Instagram rather than the site, so check those before a special trip. Open 11am daily, to 6pm Sunday through Tuesday and 8pm Wednesday through Saturday.