The Future of Cocktails: Trends & Predictions

Every era in cocktail history has felt like a culmination — the Golden Age thought it had perfected the art; Prohibition felt like an ending; the Craft Cocktail Renaissance felt like a definitive recovery. In each case, what followed was something that the previous era could not have predicted. The current moment in cocktail culture is similarly rich with competing forces, some of which will prove decisive and some of which will fade. What the bar looks like in 2040 will surprise us.

The Low-ABV Movement

Moderation as Craft

The most significant structural shift in cocktail culture over the past decade is the normalization of lower-alcohol options. This is not primarily driven by abstinence or moralism but by a generation of drinkers who want to drink better rather than more — who understand that the third Negroni obliterates the nuance they were paying to experience in the first.

Low-ABV cocktails — those built around wine, beer, vermouth, amaro, or lower-proof spirits — have moved from a niche offering to a standard menu category at quality bars. The Spritz family (Aperol, Campari, wine, soda) exemplifies the category: genuinely pleasurable, lower in alcohol than a spirit-forward cocktail, and more appropriate for the extended social drinking of an aperitivo hour.

The bartending techniques required for low-ABV cocktails differ from those for spirit-forward drinks. Without high-proof spirit to mask flaws, every other ingredient is exposed. A vermouth-forward cocktail reveals the quality (or otherwise) of the vermouth more nakedly than a gin martini does. The Spritz template — modifier, wine, sparkling dilution — requires understanding of how wines and modifiers interact, which is a different knowledge base from the spirit-centered training that has dominated craft bartending.

Non-Alcoholic (NA) Cocktails

The Zero-Proof Revolution

Non-alcoholic spirits — products designed to mimic the flavor complexity of spirits without alcohol — have proliferated since roughly 2018. Products like Seedlip (launched 2015), Lyre's, and dozens of others offer bartenders materials for building complex, spirit-free drinks that are more interesting than soda water or juice. The category has grown from a novelty to a genuine commercial segment, driven partly by the "sober curious" movement and partly by the recognition that excellent hospitality extends to guests who don't drink alcohol.

The challenge for NA cocktail makers is understanding what alcohol actually does in a cocktail beyond intoxication. Alcohol is a solvent that carries aromatic compounds. It provides viscosity (body) that water alone does not. It creates a characteristic warming sensation. NA spirits attempt to replicate these functional roles through various means: distillation of botanicals, glycerin for body, piperine for warmth. The results vary widely in quality, and the category is still developing.

What the NA movement has done unambiguously is force the bar industry to take non-drinking guests seriously. For too long, the choice for a non-drinker at a craft cocktail bar was a Shirley Temple or a glass of water. Today, the best bars offer curated NA menus with the same level of thought and craft as their alcohol menus. This is a genuine improvement in hospitality, whatever one thinks of the beverages themselves.

Sustainability in Bar Operations

The Environmental Reckoning

The craft cocktail movement's emphasis on fresh ingredients — citrus, herbs, fruit — generates significant waste. A busy craft cocktail bar can produce dozens of pounds of citrus husks per night. Ice production is energy-intensive. Single-use straws, cocktail picks, and garnish waste add up. The bar industry, long slow to address these issues, has accelerated its sustainability efforts in response to consumer pressure and staff advocacy.

Waste reduction at the bar level has produced some genuinely innovative techniques. Fat-Washing — infusing spirits with fatty substances to add flavor, then freezing and removing the fat — was developed partly as a waste-reduction technique: bacon fat, beef tallow, and other kitchen byproducts that would otherwise be discarded can become flavoring agents for spirits. Oleo-saccharum — Oleo Saccharum, or oil sugar — extracts citrus oils from peels that would otherwise be composted, using them as a syrup base for punch and other drinks.

Some bars have taken a whole-citrus approach: extract juice for sour mix, dry and powder the spent peels for use as a rim salt, make a cordial from the pith. This zero-waste philosophy has produced drinks that are more complex than their fresh-ingredient counterparts because they incorporate the full character of the fruit rather than just its juice.

AI and Automation

Technology at the Bar

Artificial intelligence has entered the cocktail world primarily through two channels: recipe development and service automation.

AI-assisted recipe development — using machine learning to identify flavor compound combinations that are likely to work well together — has produced a small number of interesting cocktails at experimental bars and distilleries. The outputs require human judgment to finalize: an AI can suggest that a combination of compounds is theoretically harmonious, but a human palate must evaluate whether the result is actually good. The technology is most useful as a brainstorming tool, expanding the search space for new flavor combinations beyond what any individual bartender might intuit.

Automated cocktail service — robotic bartenders in airports and cruise ships, cocktail vending machines, tablet-based ordering systems — has grown as an alternative to human bartenders in high-volume, low-margin environments. These systems can produce consistent drinks quickly and without the labor costs of a skilled bartender. They cannot, however, read a guest's mood, adapt to an off-menu request, or provide the hospitality that is the other half of what great bars offer.

The question for the future is not whether technology will enter the bar — it already has — but where it adds value and where it subtracts it. Jigger precision and Bar Spoon consistency are things automation can replicate. The conversation at the bar, the recognition of a regular customer's preferences, the creative response to an unusual request — these are the things that will determine whether there remain good reasons to hire human bartenders.

The Road Ahead

What Endures

Prediction is difficult, and the history of cocktails suggests that the forces that will shape the next twenty years are already present but not yet legible as decisive. What can be said with confidence is what has always endured through every era of the cocktail's history: the fundamental pleasures of Balance, Dilution, cold temperature, and good company.

The Old Fashioned template — spirit, sweetener, bitters — has survived Prohibition, the dark ages, and the craft revival. The Sour template — spirit, citrus, sweetener — is as fresh and relevant in 2024 as it was in 1862. These are not trends; they are structures. The drinks that endure are those that express something true about pleasure, about the interaction of flavors, about what it feels like to be a social creature sharing a ritual.

The future of cocktails will certainly include things we cannot predict: new spirits from regions not yet on the cocktail world's map, techniques not yet invented, flavor combinations not yet imagined. It will also include, with absolute certainty, some form of the Martini, the Old Fashioned, and the Daiquiri. The history of the cocktail is, at its core, the history of a few great ideas that keep proving themselves worth returning to.