Monday Gin is a London Dry made in small batches in Southern California and bottled at 0.0%. Juniper leads and does not apologise for it, then bitter lemon, a burst of grapefruit, and a quiet line of coriander underneath. No sugar, no carbs. It is never fermented rather than dealcoholised, and it pours at full strength — the producer mixes it 1:1 in classic cocktails, so nothing on this list needs diluting first.
Below are ten drinks built around it, ordered from the simplest to the most involved, and each one says why it works.
First: this gin arrives with the lever most 0.0% bottles have to borrow
Bitterness does more work in a gin drink than anything else. It is what makes a glass feel structured instead of sweet, and it is the thing that goes missing when the alcohol does. Most 0.0% gins have to borrow it — from tonic, from an aperitif, from citrus pith.
This one does not. Bitter lemon and grapefruit are in the tasting note, not in the mixer, and there is no sugar anywhere in the bottle to soften them. That is the whole argument of this list, and it changes what you should pour into it.
It also means the standard zero-proof reflex is wrong here. The usual instinct is to reach for something sweet to fill the space alcohol left behind. With this gin that fights the bottle. If you worked through our Whissin list, unlearn it before you start: Whissin is a sweet concentrate that needs diluting three to one and its syrup cut back. Monday is the exact inverse — full strength, bone dry, and it wants acid and bitterness rather than sugar.
The four levers
Alcohol carries texture, warmth and length. Take it out and put nothing back, and a drink reads as juice in a nice glass. Every recipe below pulls at least two of these four.
- Bitterness. Quinine, gentian, citrus pith, bitter herbs. This gin brings its own, so the job here is stacking a second kind rather than manufacturing the first.
- Acid. Fresh citrus. Grapefruit and lime suit this bottle better than orange, which is too sweet against it.
- Texture. Carbonation, aquafaba, honey, tomato. This replaces the weight alcohol used to provide.
- Salt. A pinch in shaken drinks. It rounds sourness and pushes juniper forward.
One principle decides which classics are worth attempting: drinks with several ingredients adapt far better than minimalist, spirit-forward ones. A Rickey or a spritz has somewhere to hide. A stirred drink has nowhere — which is why the stirred one is last, with instructions.
1. Gin & Bitter Lemon
50ml Monday Gin · 150ml bitter lemon · wide strip of grapefruit peel
Fill a tall glass to the very top with ice. Pour the gin, then the bitter lemon slowly down the inside of the glass so the bubbles survive. One stir, no more. Express the grapefruit peel over the surface and drop it in.
Why it works: bitter lemon carries quinine the way tonic does, but it brings lemon acid along with it, so you get two levers out of one bottle. The grapefruit oil from the peel meets the grapefruit already in the gin and doubles it. Tonic works here. Bitter lemon works better, and it is the serve to judge the bottle by.
2. The Gin Rickey
60ml Monday Gin · half a fresh lime · soda water
Squeeze the lime half into a tall glass and drop the spent shell in after it. Fill with ice, add the gin, top with soda. Stir once, gently.
Why it works: the Rickey is the only drink in the classic canon with no sugar in it whatsoever, which makes it the natural home for a gin that has none either. Nothing competes with the juniper. Leaving the spent shell in the glass matters more than it sounds: it keeps releasing peel oil while you drink, and peel oil is where most of the aroma comes from once there is no alcohol to carry it.
3. The Salty Dog
50ml Monday Gin · 100ml fresh pink grapefruit juice · flaky salt · grapefruit wedge
Run the wedge around half the rim and roll that half in flaky salt, leaving the other half clean. Fill with ice, add the gin, then the juice. Stir.
Why it works: grapefruit is bitter and sour at the same time, which is why it suits this gin where orange or lemon alone would not. The salt does two jobs — it rounds off the sourness and it lifts the juniper. Salting only half the rim lets you taste the difference sip to sip, and the difference is larger than most people expect. Without the salt this is a Greyhound, and a noticeably flatter drink.
4. The Bitter Grapefruit Spritz
40ml Monday Gin · 40ml Melati Botanical Aperitif · 80ml soda water · half wheel of grapefruit
Pack a large wine glass with ice. Gin, Melati, soda, one gentle stir. Tuck the grapefruit in against the ice rather than perching it on the rim.
Why it works: Melati is rooty and herbal-bitter where the gin is citrus-bitter, so you are stacking two different kinds rather than doubling the same one. That layering is what a real spritz does. The carbonation covers texture, and at 40:40 neither bottle dominates. This is the one on the list to make for a table.
5. The Californian
50ml Monday Gin · 75ml pink grapefruit juice · 15ml rosemary syrup · soda · rosemary sprig
For the syrup, heat 100ml water with 100g sugar until it dissolves, take it off the heat, drop in three rosemary sprigs and leave it 20 minutes, then strain. Shake gin, juice and syrup with ice. Strain over fresh ice, add a short top of soda. Slap the rosemary sprig once between your palms and lay it across the glass.
Why it works: rosemary is resinous and pine-forward, the same aromatic family as juniper, so it extends the gin rather than covering it. The 15ml of syrup is deliberately small — just enough to take the hard edge off raw grapefruit without sweetening a bottle that was built dry.
6. The Bee's Knees
50ml Monday Gin · 20ml lemon juice · 20ml honey syrup · lemon twist
Make honey syrup first: two parts honey stirred into one part warm water. Shake all three hard with ice, double-strain into a chilled coupe.
Why it works: honey is thicker than sugar syrup, and the thickness is the point — it puts back a little of the weight the alcohol used to carry. Honey also has a faint bitterness of its own, which sits against this gin far better than plain sugar does. Thin it with warm water before it goes near the shaker, or it sinks to the bottom and never integrates.
7. The Basil Smash
50ml Monday Gin · 25ml lemon juice · 15ml simple syrup · large handful of basil
Press the basil into the lemon juice in the base of the shaker — press once, do not pulverise it. Add gin, syrup and plenty of ice, shake hard for 12 seconds, double-strain over fresh ice. Fresh basil on top.
Why it works: basil is one of the few herbs with enough aromatic force to read clearly over a juniper this bold. But shredding it releases chlorophyll and turns the drink grassy and green-bitter in the wrong way, so one firm press is all it gets. The hard shake is doing the texture work; under-shake this and it falls flat.
8. The Gin Fizz
50ml Monday Gin · 25ml lemon juice · 15ml simple syrup · 20ml aquafaba · soda water
Dry-shake everything except the soda for 10 seconds with no ice. Add ice, shake 10 seconds more. Strain into a tall narrow glass with no ice in it and let it settle for half a minute. Then pour the soda slowly through the centre of the foam.
Why it works: a fizz is the texture lever used twice — aquafaba builds the head, carbonation lifts it from underneath. The technique detail that decides it is where the soda goes: through the middle of the foam, not down the side of the glass. That is what pushes the head up above the rim instead of collapsing it. Aquafaba is simply the liquid from a tin of chickpeas.
9. The Red Snapper
50ml Monday Gin · 100ml tomato juice · 15ml lemon juice · celery salt · black pepper · pinch of cayenne · celery stick
Build in a tall glass over ice, then roll it — pour the whole thing back and forth between two glasses four or five times instead of shaking. Season, taste, season again.
Why it works: the Red Snapper is the Bloody Mary's gin-based older sibling, and it is the drink on this list least affected by removing alcohol, because the tomato juice already supplies every bit of the body. Juniper against tomato, pepper and celery salt is a savoury pairing most people have never tried and immediately understand. Roll it rather than shaking it: shaking aerates the tomato and turns a heavy drink thin and frothy.
10. The Martinez — the hard one, and why
50ml Monday Gin · 20ml Espadafor Versin · 3 drops saline solution · lemon twist
Stir with plenty of ice for a full 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express a lemon peel over the surface and discard it.
Why it is hard, and why this version works: every other drink here had acid, bubbles or sugar to negotiate between the two ingredients. This one has none, and it exposes a genuine collision. Monday is bone dry with no sugar at all; Versin is properly sweet and heavily spiced. Built at the classic Martinez ratio, which was vermouth-led, the vermouth simply wins and the gin disappears underneath it. Three fixes, all required. Flip the ratio hard in the gin's favour. Stir far longer than feels right, because the dilution is what knits two things that do not naturally agree. Add saline — dissolve 1g of salt in 10ml of warm water — which pulls the juniper back up to the front.
The original also calls for maraschino. There is no 0.0% version worth using, and this is a case where you leave a gap rather than fill it: sweetness is already the problem in this glass, so adding more would make it worse, not more authentic. (If it is the classic stirred martini you are after, our Ginsin list ends with one — a softer, more floral gin is the easier bottle for that particular drink.)
Which bottles this list actually needs
Eight of these ten need nothing but Monday Gin, a citrus and a mixer. Only two reach for a second bottle: the spritz wants Melati for its rooty bitterness, and the Martinez wants Versin for spiced sweetness.
A note on choosing between our two 0.0% gins, because they are not interchangeable. Monday is the dry, bold, grapefruit-and-pith one — it belongs in the Rickey, the Salty Dog and anything savoury. Ginsin 12 Botanics is softer and properly floral, with violet, lavender and orange blossom in the mix, and it is the better bottle for delicate stirred drinks and anything built on sparkling wine. Buy the one that matches the drinks you actually make.
