Sober Social

Wisconsin has the kind of drinking reputation that shows up in national rankings and in jokes, and Middleton sits in the middle of it — a suburb of a capital city in a state where the supper club and the tavern are civic institutions. Kristi Tanner opened Sober Social there in May 2024 anyway, in a roughly 700-square-foot storefront at 1814 Parmenter Street, and made it the first all-non-alcoholic bottle shop in the state. The Capital Times covered it as a booze-free liquor shop trying to build a movement, which is closer to how Tanner talks about it than a retail story would be.

The range opened at 35 brands and has grown past 100 products across non-alcoholic beer, wine, distilled spirit alternatives, aperitifs, ready-to-drink cocktails and functional drinks — including the mushroom-based Little Saints cans that City Cast Madison singled out. For a region whose non-alcoholic drinking otherwise happens inside bars, the value of a shop is different in kind: it is where you build the home bar, where you find out that de-alcoholised wine and non-alcoholic spirit are different categories with different uses, and where somebody who has done the tasting will tell you which bottles are worth the money. That advice function is most of what a good NA shop sells.

It is also worth understanding what Sober Social is not. It is small, it is in a suburb about twenty minutes west of downtown Madison, and it keeps retail hours — Wednesday through Saturday noon to 7pm, Sunday noon to 4pm, closed Monday and Tuesday — so it is an errand rather than an evening. Pair it with Rooted In Sanity on Williamson Street, the metro's only kava lounge, and you have the entirety of Madison's fully alcohol-free scene in two stops; everything else good here, and there is a lot of it, sits inside rooms that also pour alcohol.