Between full strength and nothing
Lighter drinks
Most drinking-less advice offers two options: the cocktail, or the mocktail. The useful answer is usually in between.
CocktailHQ has had alcohol-free counterparts for a while and a whole section devoted to them. What it never had was the middle rung — the drink that is still a drink, just weaker. That gap matters, because "something lighter" is a far more common request than "nothing at all".
Everything below is measured in UK units per serve, taken from each recipe's own authored nutrition figures rather than estimated here. Those figures are estimates themselves — see any recipe's nutrition panel for its assumptions — so treat them as a reliable ordering rather than a precise measurement.
All three rungs
Full strength, lighter, alcohol-free
Drinks where the whole ladder exists — the same idea at three different strengths.
Lighter
Alcohol-free
Alcohol-free
One step down
Lower-alcohol alternatives
Named pairs: a drink you already know, and a genuinely lighter one in the same territory.
Campari and sweet vermouth topped with soda water — the bittersweet forerunner of the Negroni.
Chilled vermouth lengthened with soda water and an orange twist — a genuinely low-alcohol aperitif built for long, easy sipping.
Equal parts Campari, sweet vermouth and sparkling wine — the 'mistaken' Negroni with the gin swapped for bubbles.
Chilled white wine lengthened with soda water — the simplest, lowest-alcohol way to make a glass of wine last longer.
Pale lager cut fifty-fifty with cloudy lemonade — a low-alcohol, high-refreshment pub classic.
Prosecco, elderflower cordial, soda and fresh mint over ice — a paler, more floral cousin of the Aperol Spritz.
Why so few, and why the numbers are shown
These are authored pairs, recorded on both recipes — not a nearest-neighbour search. There are 6 of them because that is how many genuinely hold up: the Americano is the Negroni with soda instead of gin, and that is a real relationship rather than a resemblance. The unit figures are shown on every pair precisely because some of these steps are modest. A 0.3-unit difference is a real reduction and a small one, and you should be able to see which you are getting.
Browse by strength
Every low-alcohol recipe, weakest first
Drinks the catalogue classifies as low-alcohol, ordered by UK units per serve.
Sparkling wine and fresh orange juice, half and half — brunch's simplest cocktail.
Campari and orange juice, and the orange juice is aerated until it is almost foam — two ingredients, one technique.
Prosecco and white peach purée, folded together in a flute — pale, fizzy and delicately fruity.
Campari and sweet vermouth topped with soda water — the bittersweet forerunner of the Negroni.
Pale lager cut fifty-fifty with cloudy lemonade — a low-alcohol, high-refreshment pub classic.
Chilled vermouth lengthened with soda water and an orange twist — a genuinely low-alcohol aperitif built for long, easy sipping.
Chilled white wine lengthened with soda water — the simplest, lowest-alcohol way to make a glass of wine last longer.
Prosecco, elderflower cordial, soda and fresh mint over ice — a paler, more floral cousin of the Aperol Spritz.
Pimm's No. 1, lemonade and a garden's worth of fruit and cucumber — the quintessential English summer cup.
All the way down
Alcohol-free counterparts
27 cocktails on the site have a named alcohol-free counterpart — the same drink rebuilt rather than a different one suggested. Those are paired up, with what each swap keeps and drops, on the cocktail-to-mocktail page.
How this page is built
Pairs come from relationships authored on both recipes, never from name or flavour similarity. Unit figures come from each recipe's own authored nutrition estimate. Where a recipe page suggests a lighter drink that is not one of the pairs above, it says so explicitly — those are computed from drink family and unit count, which is arithmetic rather than a recommendation.
Nothing here is health advice. It answers a question about strength, which is something the catalogue already records.