How It Started: The New Bar

As the alcohol-free category continues to expand with new zero-proof offerings, more spirit-free bottle shops and sober bars are opening across the country. And the growth shows no signs of slowing. Last year, even the cultural touchstone Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival hosted a spirit-free bar, thanks to the influence of Brianda Gonzalez. Gonzalez is the founder of Los Angeles’ The New Bar spirit-free bottle shop, which opened in July of 2022. Here she shares how her father inspired her to explore the NA category, how she built her store, and how she convinced one of the most popular music festivals in the world to embrace mindful drinking.

Brianda Gonzalez:

The way I grew up set me up for where I am today and why I’m so passionate about [the NA] space. I was born in Mexico, and my family immigrated to the U.S. when I was 7. We ended up on Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California. It has one tiny town, Avalon, where I grew up from age 7 until I went to college. But that town and the island itself are entirely driven by the hospitality economy. It’s the primary way my dad put food on the table. He’s a bartender by trade. 

We’ve always had a family obsession with food and drink. We like to cook and make delicious cocktails. I wasn’t aware just how much it played a role in our lives until my dad was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease a few years ago and we had to rethink how we did all of those things. You have this super healthy guy who dropped a ton of weight and looked terrifyingly sick. It was a scary time for my family.

“I started to think, ‘What if I made it easier for people to find incredible products? What if I made this feel more accessible and exciting and fun and a little bit less painful to find a great alternative?'”

Luckily, my dad’s okay now, but in that process, I became passionate about finding moments that we could share together. A lot of that was creating good drinks. I first became obsessed with the nonalcoholic category through that experience and found that there were so many amazing options out there. But they were a little bit hard to find. It felt like a scattered category. I tried a lot of products that I loved and my dad loved and that we felt gave us a new perspective. My dad’s a pretty open-minded guy, and he loves flavors, so he was really excited. When he tried a nonalcoholic mezcal, it blew his mind.

Opening the New Bar

I started to think, ‘What if I made it easier for people to find incredible products? What if I made this feel more accessible and exciting and fun and a little bit less painful to find a great alternative?’

In January of 2022, I left my career in tech and started focusing full-time on building The New Bar. I started it as an online concept first and had a spreadsheet with 500 products I wanted to try, with tasting notes on all of them—what I thought was great and what information I wanted to share. By July of 2022, I had launched our website and opened the doors to our retail location in Venice, which is our first store. It was a fairly quick turnaround. I was 100 percent committed to thinking about it and building it every single day. It’s been incredible. 

The whole inception of it, and the building of it, was very grassroots, with the help and collaboration of friends. It’s representative of how we talk about the [NA] category, when we want what we’re doing to inspire other people. Now we’re growing and opening two more stores in the next few months in California: a second location in LA [in February] and one in the Bay Area [by early spring]. I just hope that we can keep that magic and that way of building and growing as we scale.

Approaching Coachella

[Being part of Coachella] was a big deal in our first year. I was building out The New Bar. I’m a solo founder and was the only full-time employee. By December of that year—just a few months after inception—we approached Coachella and landed that incredible partnership. But it was always a dream of mine, from the minute I was writing out The New Bar’s business plan—where I envisioned it evolving and where I would love to see it show up.

“It was always about making it fun for people to be good to themselves.”

Coachella felt like a natural extension because my whole point was to make this category fun, to make it approachable to people who, like me, arrived at the category by unconventional means or just learned about the amazing benefits that incorporating the nonalcoholic category into your life can have. It was always about making it fun for people to be good to themselves. A manifestation of that was to show up in places like Coachella, where people are having a ton of fun and you might not expect a more moderated or mindful approach to that kind of fun. But it actually makes a ton of sense, and it’s a great place to change some minds. 

Coachella is also incredibly innovative in their food and beverage programming. We felt like they could benefit from having a dedicated partner that could help them understand how to roll this out mindfully and execute in a way that would be impactful. It was about the fact that their demographic clearly was yearning for this. The festival is focused on creating cultural movements and being that place where trends are born. And they’re focused on inclusivity. It felt like a natural brand alignment.

Headlining at the Festival

[Alcohol-free drinks] is a new category, and a lot of the brands are small like us. They traditionally might not have access to a big moment like this. Being the umbrella that housed these other brands and gave them that platform made all of us more powerful in our ability to execute something like this. It was really fun and rewarding, but it definitely took some convincing. There was no previous data to look at. This was the first time it had ever been done.

We built a full-service bar experience in the festival, with two bars on festival grounds: one in general admission and one in VIP. We had an elevated bar experience. Not just a concert bar experience with options like Vodka Soda. We had true craft cocktails, beers, wines, ready-to-drink cocktails—all of the things you would expect at an amazing bar. But no alcohol. We also had integrated programming throughout the festival. We were offered backstage in some places, at the Safari Campgrounds, at the Outstanding in the Field dinner series. So we had additional touchpoints to introduce this option to people.

The Big Moment

I was there both weekends on the ground, and seeing customer reactions was amazing. Each time I talked to a customer, they were like, “I had no idea this was an option” and “I’m so excited about it because now I can enjoy it and you’ve changed my mind.” Or, “I’ve been dying for something like this. I’ve been coming to this festival for years and I’ve always felt left out.” Or, “I’ve always struggled to be more mindful about the way that I showed up and now I feel like I have a tool to do that.” It was pretty incredible to see. 

Now I’m in the process of building out Coachella 2024. We’ll be doing it again and growing our partnership with AEG. And we may be staying for Stagecoach [outdoor country music festival] this year. We’ve since seen more venues and festivals and sporting events reach out with interest in building these programs. So it will continue to be something we put effort behind. We’re very committed to this idea of having a nonalcoholic option served wherever any fun is being had.

—As told to Caroline Pardilla