Soda Bitters Is Still the Best Nonalcoholic Cocktail

Time flies when you’re thirsty. It has somehow, impossibly, been five years since I wrote the piece in which I argued forcefully for the many-splendored delights of combining sparkling water with a dash—or five—of cocktail bitters. 

The market availability in both these product categories has gone gonzo here in the third decade of the 21st century, the great seltzer boom (“c’est La Croix”) of the late 2010s bouncing happily off the ongoing vogue for bitters of every stripe and extraction as an essential component to the modern cocktail bar. At a place like Amor y Amargo in New York’s East Village—still the best bitters bar in America, 15 years on—one can delight in a full-spectrum ROYGBIV color wheel of dasher bottles in every possible flavor and tone, and online webshops like Bitters & Bottles offer more than 150 selections, all shippable to your door.

It seemed like we were primed for a new golden era of the bitters and soda, a sterling epoch for which I was chuffed to serve as the great big booming town cryer. Bitters and soda is good, I proclaimed! Surely this not-a-cocktail but also definitely-a-cocktail was primed to take the post-pandemic drinking milieu by storm! 

Well—lived history has a way of making fools of us all. Verily the nonalcoholic drinking trend boomed voluminously over the last five years, in sales and cultural cachet and investment year-over-year on-trend alpha throughput yada yada, but nearly all of that has been predicated on developing a new lexicon of elixirs and potions and adaptogenic tonics and herbal decoctions and assorted nöotropic nostrums. Our drinking moment represents a veritable buffet bar of salad days for the N/A beer industry, in particular; it is the only segment of beer as an entire beverage sector with anything like positive growth. People even keep trying to make N/A wine happen (which feels very fetch to me). Perhaps the only node or category of N/A drinks that has not gone absolutely gonzo parabolic in terms of sales and interest and TikTok meta-performance is my beloved soda bitters.

I would like to state for the record that everyone is wrong about this. I think there’s a couple of reasons why soda bitters has yet to properly #trend online and in bars: the hegemonic mono-control of mineral water in America in the hands of a certain very large and deeply monied supercorporation, for starters; but also the emotional and psychological connectivity cocktail bitters have to the (gulp) Golden Age of Cocktails Revival, a time of great millennial promise, an era of filament light bulbs and L Train boltholes and suspenders a-go-go and much earnest shaking from behind the bar. Cocktail bitters did not, in fact, go out of style with neo-Balkan indie folk; it remains a thriving category with many new entrants and myriad applications from the bar to the kitchen to the bottle of bubble water. But there’s always going to be some who associate it with fussy cocktails alone, much to their own detriment. 

I recommended some really delicious soda bitters combos back in 2021, and I’m glad to do it again here now in 2026. This remains the superlative end-all be-all of stylish N/A drinking, at home or as a call-out in the bar, and my greatest dream would be for more bars and drinkers to embrace the possibilities. The water you use matters, the bitters you use matter, and the results can be astonishingly delicious.