The Local by Dunloe Brewing

The Local is Dunloe Brewing's taproom on 3rd Street in Davis, the university town about fifteen miles west of Sacramento and part of the wider metro. Its alcohol-free contribution is a house-made dry-hopped lemonade: Centennial hops combined with a hibiscus-lime concentrate.

That is a more considered drink than it sounds. Centennial is a classic American hop, floral and citrusy with a firm bitterness, and dry-hopping a lemonade with it produces something with genuine aromatic lift and a dry finish rather than a sweet one. The hibiscus adds tartness and colour. Crucially the brewery makes it rather than buying it, which means the alcohol-free option is a product of the same craft as everything else on the bar.

One point requires care. The taproom also pours the Barbless Hook, a 2.5% ABV light lager, and low-alcohol is not alcohol-free. For someone cutting down it may be exactly right; for someone who does not drink at all — in recovery, pregnant, on medication, or abstaining for faith — it is not an option, and the distinction gets blurred constantly in coverage of this category. This listing separates them deliberately: the dry-hopped lemonade and the seltzers are the zero-proof choices here.

Davis is a college town with a large student population and correspondingly heavy drinking culture, so a taproom making a proper non-alcoholic drink in-house has real local value. Hours run 2pm to 10pm Tuesday through Saturday and to 8pm on Sunday and Monday.

Davis also justifies its own entry rather than being folded into Sacramento generally. It is fifteen miles west, a separate town with its own downtown, and the University of California campus gives it a population of tens of thousands of students — a group both heavily targeted by drinking culture and increasingly likely to opt out of it, since American under-25s now drink markedly less than the generation before them. A taproom in that town making its own alcohol-free drink is meeting a demand that is growing rather than performing a courtesy.