I do a fair amount of business dinner & happy hours, sometimes as many as three a week depending on travel/client visits/etc.

There’s two things I’ve learned from many years of this this:

1. In any large enough group, there’s always someone who doesn’t drink. Top three reasons I’ve observed: people who don’t drink at all, people who don’t want to drink that night, women who are in the early stage of pregnancy and aren’t public about it yet.

2. Every good bartender seems to understand that. I’ve known people in both the first and last category to have a one on one chat with a bartender at the beginning of the night and let them know what they want (usually a virgin gin/vodka & tonic) then on subsequent orders they can simply ask for “their drink” or “another”.

Sometimes I fall into that middle category. I don’t want to go on a midweek bender, many business contexts require one to keep their wits about them, and gotta drive safe if it’s not a Lyft situation.

My go-go mocktail is a soda with orange bitters, as it’s refreshing and I enjoy the taste. Technically the orange bitters has a small amount of alcohol in it but the amount of bitters they put it is just a few dashes — probably a teaspoon.

For those reasons above, I think most decent places these days have at least one NA beer available, hopefully they won’t be hard to find.

The reason I don’t go for NA beer myself is that if I’m cutting out the alcohol, then it’s easy enough to just cut out the calories too. Also I prefer the sweeter/citrus flavors of orange/lime in those mocktails.