Speak in Code

Speak in Code — styled [SiC] — opened in 2018 on Jackson's Row, a narrow lane running off Deansgate in Manchester's Civic Quarter, close to the Town Hall and Central Library. It is the work of a small, self-consciously nerdy team built around two obsessions: flavour exploration and hip hop. The bar has become a near-permanent fixture of the UK bar-awards circuit, ranked inside the national Top 50 Cocktail Bars — it was named No. 10 in the UK at the 2022 awards and has remained on the list since — and it built that reputation on a fully plant-based, made-from-scratch approach in which fermentation, carbonation, distillation and house syrups all happen on site.

The room reads as an 'industrial New York' den: a cosy, brick-lined space with subdued lighting, dark wood, plush velvet furnishings and kintsugi-style gold repairs on chipped glassware, soundtracked by laid-back lo-fi hip hop. It is deliberately intimate — low-lit and capped at six people per booking — and pairs its forward-thinking cocktails with plant-based comfort food and small plates. The whole operation leans hard on a reuse-and-repurpose ethos, from homemade cordials to banana-skin 'bacon', so little is wasted behind the bar.

Crucially for non-drinkers, the alcohol-free drinks are a named section of the current menu booklet (version 16-3, uploaded June 2026) rather than an off-menu afterthought, and they are built with exactly the same in-house technique as the full-strength list, every one priced at £8. The line-up includes the Junebug AF, in which banana, melon and pineapple are fermented into a house soda; a Shandy carbonated from Citra hops, Nashi pear, apple and dandelion; Raspberries + C.R.E.A.M., which washes Almave 0.0% agave spirit through ice cream and lengthens it with a carbonic raspberry soda; and the [SiC] Chinotto, a bittersweet build of zero-proof Amaro Lucano over house chinotto soda, alongside an alcohol-free Tepache. Because the base spirits used here — Almave and Amaro Lucano 0% — sit outside the usual non-alcoholic-brand roster, the zero-proof drinks feel genuinely of the bar rather than assembled from off-the-shelf bottles.