Taano House

Taano House is a non-alcoholic trailer bar parked at 1109 East 6th Street, in the middle of the East Sixth entertainment district, open daily from 5pm to 2am. It opened on 15 August 2024 from University of Texas professor Geoff Smith and Joe Wes, co-founders of Taano Elevated Beverages, with a menu developed by Shaun Meglen, a mixologist and product education director at Southern Glazer's. Its stated aim, in the founders' words to the Austin Chronicle, was to create drinks that promote relaxation, euphoria and sociability the same way alcohol does, but without its negative health effects.

That sentence is the whole proposition, and it needs reading carefully, because Taano House is not a mocktail bar. The drinks are built on legal psychoactive plants: kava, kanna, blue lotus and Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric mushroom. The Egyptian Mule combines blue lotus with Amethyst's cucumber-ginger-serrano non-alcoholic spirit, ginger beer and lime. The Molly Martini puts kanna with espresso and Lyre's non-alcoholic coffee liqueur. The Real Green Tea Shot is kanna with green tea, lemon, peach and spirulina. There is a mushroom wine pairing Amanita muscaria with Oddbird non-alcoholic wine.

This site exists in large part for people in recovery, so the distinction has to be stated flatly rather than implied. Taano House is alcohol-free. It is not substance-free, and it is not sober in the sense most recovery programmes use the word. Kava is a sedative; kanna is a mood-altering plant; blue lotus is mildly psychoactive; Amanita muscaria is a genuinely psychoactive mushroom whose active compounds are not the same as psilocybin but are intoxicating nonetheless. These are being served deliberately, as the point of the bar, not incidentally.

For someone who has stopped drinking but is not avoiding all intoxicants, that may be exactly what they are looking for, and the bar is upfront about what it does. For anyone whose sobriety means abstaining from mood-altering substances entirely, this is a venue to walk past — and knowing that in advance is more useful than a recommendation.