The Open Road

The Open Road began in January 2020 as a Dry January pop-up bar inside a downtown coffee shop, which makes it one of the oldest non-alcoholic specialty retailers in the country. Mel Babitz started it for a straightforward reason, and has said so plainly: she personally cannot drink alcohol, it does not get along with her body, and the project came from being in her twenties, wanting to go out and still have fun and even have a drink while she was at it. The pop-up became an Allentown storefront in March 2022 and moved to Penn Avenue in Garfield in August 2024, into a space a little over double the size with room to open an on-premise bar. The shelves hold over four hundred non-alcoholic beers, wines, spirits and ready-to-drink cocktails, and the buying is notably local: Jackworth, Two Frays, Cinderlands and Arsenal Cider House all sit on them. As Babitz points out, Two Frays is still the only craft brewery in Pennsylvania making non-alcoholic beer.

One thing has to be said clearly, because the shop's name and category would lead you to assume otherwise. This is an alcohol-free shop, not an intoxicant-free one. Babitz's own description is that half the store is dedicated to functional beverages that actually do something to your body — caffeinated iced teas, nootropics, adaptogenic mushrooms like lion's mane and reishi, and hemp-based drinks with CBD and THC. Those are real doses: a mango THC seltzer at 10mg of hemp-derived delta-9, a lemon CBD seltzer at 20mg, a hemp-and-adaptogen soda carrying 3mg THC with 6mg CBD and 2,200mg of lion's mane, a kava spirit at 150mg of kavalactones a serving. Every one of them is printed 0.0% ABV, which is true and is exactly the point of confusion. If you are avoiding alcohol only, this is the best-stocked room in Pennsylvania for you. If you are in recovery and avoiding intoxicants generally, you can still shop here happily — but read the label rather than the ABV, and ask, because the staff know precisely what is in everything.