The date and the clock
Dry January 2027 runs from Friday, January 1, to Sunday, January 31. It is a campaign run by Alcohol Change UK, a UK charity, which asks people to take a 31-day break from alcohol in January. Your guests may use the name whether or not they signed up for anything.
January 1 is the morning after New Year’s Eve, the bar’s biggest night. So the Dry January list has to be built in December, before the holiday rush, and put on the menu in the quiet days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. On January 1, the bartender should not be inventing drinks.
The one decision: a section or a separate menu. Put the zero-proof drinks in their own section on the drink list everyone reads. A separate menu has to be asked for, and the guest who is not drinking in January usually does not want to ask.
Timeline: six weeks out to the morning after
These are the Dry January steps. The general mechanics of changing a menu are in the seasonal menu changeover checklist.
| When | Kitchen | Bar | Front of house | The menu |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Six weeks out (mid November) | Offer shrubs, syrups, and juices from the kitchen’s prep. | Draft four zero-proof drinks. Taste non-alcoholic beers and wines. | Decide how servers will offer them. | Add a Zero proof section to the drink list, hidden. |
| Four weeks out | Scale the syrups for a month. | Cost each drink. Test each at speed. | Taste every drink with the staff. | Write names and descriptions, base first. |
| Two weeks out | Nothing new. | Order non-alcoholic beer and wine for a month. | Brief the floor. | Proof it. |
| December 28 to 30 | Batch the syrups. | Stock the well. | Nothing new. | Show the section. Print the drink list. |
| Through January | Keep the syrups coming. | Track which drinks sell. | Offer them the same way as any drink. | Hide what runs out; switch it back on when it is made. |
| February 1 | Nothing. | Keep the best two or three. | Nothing. | Trim the section rather than hiding it. |
What to pour
- Three to five zero-proof cocktails. One sour, one bitter and long, one spirit-forward built on a non-alcoholic spirit, one easy and fruity.
- At least one non-alcoholic beer. Canned is fine. Pour it in a proper glass.
- A non-alcoholic wine or a sparkling tea for the table sharing a bottle.
- Something hot, if your bar has the setup: a spiced cider, a toddy built on tea.
Write each description base first (“grapefruit, rosemary, tonic”), since the guest cannot rely on a spirit name to know what the drink is. Serve them in the same glassware as the cocktails; a zero-proof drink in a pint glass with a straw tells the guest what the bar thinks of it. For building a drink list in general, see the cocktail menu guide.
How the floor offers it matters as much as the recipe. The server who asks “anything from the bar?” and then lists the zero-proof drinks by name, the same way as the cocktails, sells more of them than the server who waits to be asked for “something without alcohol.” Put the section where the eye lands, give each drink a real name, and never make the guest explain why they are not drinking. The same goes for the check: a zero-proof drink is rung in as a drink, not as a soda with a modifier, so the bar can see at the end of the month what actually sold.
What to 86 early: the drink built on a fresh juice or shrub you make in small batches. What to keep off: anything that is just a cocktail with the spirit left out. It will taste like it, because it is.
Pricing: a worked example
This is a worked example with made-up costs for one zero-proof sour. It is not a benchmark.
| Ingredient | Example cost |
|---|---|
| 2 oz non-alcoholic spirit | $1.60 |
| 0.75 oz lemon | $0.28 |
| 0.75 oz house ginger syrup | $0.20 |
| Aquafaba, bitters, garnish | $0.22 |
| Cost per drink | $2.30 |
At a 21 percent target cost in this example, $2.30 ÷ 0.21 = $10.95, printed as $11. In this example that sits a few dollars under the same bar’s cocktails and pays for the bartender’s time the same way a cocktail does. The menu item price calculator takes any cost and target.
Print and QR plan
Reprint the drink list for January with the Zero proof section on it, in the quiet days before New Year’s Eve. It is one page, and January is a month when a fresh list is worth printing. Keep the section near the top, not on the back.
On the QR: add the section to the drink menu you already have. The code on the bar top and the tables does not change; the list behind it does. On February 1, trim the section to the drinks that sold and keep it there.
What Gaslamp does not do
It does not switch the section on at midnight on January 1; you show it before New Year’s Eve or that morning. It does not track what sells or talk to your POS. A non-alcoholic beer sold by the can and by the pint can share one line as two labeled prices. It makes no health claims for your drinks, and neither should your menu. What it does is keep the drink list, its QR code, and its PDF right from your phone for all 31 days.
January is also the start of the winter menu; see the winter menu playbook.