Zebra striping, alternating alcoholic and zero-proof drinks across a night out, has become a named consumer trend, with research showing 35 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds doing it and the no-alcohol category outgrowing alcohol across the board.
The pattern goes like this: a mezcal cocktail to open the evening, a zero-proof botanical serve for the next round, a glass of wine with dinner later on. At the NoMad London and at Panda & Sons in Edinburgh, the bartenders have a name for it now, zebra striping, the practice of alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks across a night out. The term found its footing in Britain, where the habit was common enough to need a word before anyone could say who coined it. What it describes is a person who stays at the bar all evening and drinks half as much as they used to.
A 2024 report from the British hospitality research group KAM, showed the behavior is measurable; it found that 23 percent of UK drinkers alternate between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks most or all of the time, a share that climbed to 35 percent among 18-to-24-year-olds; another 32 percent said they regularly drink water between cocktails. The youngest legal drinkers are the ones doing it most, which is the detail the alcohol industry has been watching with some unease. The name itself is part of the appeal. “People almost do a second take on the term when they hear it for the first time,” Luke Boase, the founder of Lucky Saint, told VinePair. “But they’re also usually intrigued by the term.”
Why Gen Z is drinking less (without going sober)
The zebra stripe sits inside a larger retreat from alcohol that is not a retreat from going out. Global alcohol volume grew just 0.6 percent in 2024, and the share of consumers who drink at least weekly slipped to 23 percent in 2025 from 25 percent in 2020, Euromonitor International reported. Among Gen Z of legal drinking age, 36 percent have never had alcohol at all; among occasional drinkers of every age, 53 percent are actively trying to cut back, up from 44 percent five years earlier. This is not the temporary abstinence of a Dry January. It is a standing adjustment to how much, and it keeps people in the bar rather than out of it.
The drinks industry has noticed where the money is moving. Non-alcoholic spirits grew 17 percent in 2024, non-alcoholic ready-to-drink cans 14 percent, non- and low-alcohol beer 11 percent, and non-alcoholic wine 7 percent, even as the alcoholic market flatlined, by Euromonitor’s count. “Non-alcoholic alternatives are no longer niche,” Spiros Malandrakis, the firm’s global insight manager for alcoholic drinks, said in a statement. “They’re becoming a central part of how people choose to enjoy and celebrate.” The zero-proof drink is no longer the thing you order when you have given up. It is the every-other drink.
How zebra striping turns moderation into a luxury
What separates zebra striping from simply drinking less is that it is sold as an upgrade rather than a sacrifice. The consumer specialist Kate Hardcastle, writing about the trend in Forbes, framed it less as a sobriety shift than as “treatonomics,” the pursuit of smaller, well-made indulgences when the larger ones lose their appeal, she wrote. A carefully built zero-proof botanical drink, priced like a cocktail and served in the same glassware, lets a drinker moderate and lets a bar sell a second round to someone who would otherwise have closed the tab. The premium spirits market is projected to reach $810 billion by 2033, even as alcohol volume is falling and spending on premium bottles keeps climbing,Hardcastle noted. It is the sound of people drinking less and paying more for what they do drink.
The change is clearest from behind the bar. “Non-alcoholic drinks are no longer a cop-out like they used to be,” Nicky Craig, the general manager of Panda & Sons in Edinburgh, told VinePair. The old assumption that a person nursing a soda at a bar owed the room an explanation, that they must be pregnant, driving, or off the drink for good, has thinned as the alternatives have improved.
For the bartenders, the trend has widened the job rather than shrunk the check. A guest who alternates orders twice as many drinks across a night and tastes more of the menu doing it, which turns moderation into something a bar can build a list around. “Zebra striping provides a greater opportunity for people to explore menus and for bartenders to guide experiences,” Liana Oster, the bar director at NoMad London, told VinePair. “I am not sure if we are at an inflection point purely that people are drinking less,” Hardcastle wrote, “to me this is a story about people drinking very differently.”
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