The 126

The 126 sits behind an unmarked door on College Street in downtown Burlington, and it has made a single technical decision that puts it ahead of almost every cocktail bar in the state on alcohol-free drinking. House syrups and house bitters are normally built on alcohol — bitters especially, where high-proof spirit is the standard extraction medium and the reason a dash of Angostura disqualifies a drink for anyone who is genuinely abstaining. The 126 makes all of its without. Co-owner Emily Morton put it to Edible Vermont plainly: non-alcoholic beverages get exactly the same attention as the alcoholic cocktails, and because no alcohol goes into the homemade syrups or bitters, any of them can go into a non-alcoholic drink.

That means the bar is not working from a separate, smaller pantry when it builds you something alcohol-free. It is working from the same one, which is the difference between a real programme and a short list of juices.

The drinks are printed as Temperance Cocktails, a sly reference to the movement that produced Prohibition, and each is named for one of its leaders — Carrie the Hatchet, for instance, in tribute to Carrie Nation, who campaigned against saloons with an actual hatchet. Morton reportedly insists on the Temperance label rather than the word mocktail and has been outvoted more than once by the rest of the bar, which is the sort of detail that tells you how seriously the category is taken here.

The drink names rotate, so none are recorded as signature drinks in this listing beyond the one Edible Vermont documented. What does not rotate is the section itself or the no-alcohol-in-the-syrups rule underneath it.

The bar opens at 5pm Tuesday through Saturday and runs to midnight, 1am on Friday and Saturday. It is closed Sunday and Monday.