Monday Whiskey is an American 0.0% spirit made in small batches in the style of a bourbon. Butterscotch, raisin and toasted brown sugar on the nose. Roasted coffee, caramel and molasses across the palate. The finish carries a real lingering heat down the middle of the tongue, and a late hint of orange behind it. No sugar, no carbs. It is never fermented rather than dealcoholised, and it pours at full strength — the producer mixes it 1:1, so nothing here 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. But this bottle has a particular quirk, and it is the reason a first sip can disappoint, so start there.
Read this first: it smells sweet and it tastes dry
Read the tasting notes again. Butterscotch, raisin, brown sugar, caramel, molasses — every one of those words describes sugar. Now read the panel: zero grams of it in the bottle.
That gap is not a flaw, but it is a trap. Your nose arrives at the glass expecting something rich and rounded, and the liquid that follows is dry. The brain registers the mismatch as thin, and the usual reaction is to reach for the sugar bowl. That is the wrong correction, and it produces a drink that is sweet and still somehow hollow.
What this bottle actually needs is weight, not sweetness. In a real bourbon, body comes from two places: the viscosity of the alcohol itself, and sugars pulled out of the charred barrel. Take away the first and never add the second, and what is left is a spirit with excellent flavour and very little substance behind it. So the drinks below are built around thickness — cola, cold brew, unfiltered juice, dairy, egg, molasses — rather than around syrup.
If you have poured our Mahala Amber list, note the difference carefully. That bottle also has zero sugar, and the instruction there is to put the sugar back at full measure. It works because Amber is dry on the nose and on the palate, so sugar simply restores a missing element. Monday already promises sweetness on the nose. Add sugar to chase that promise and you overshoot it. Same reading on the panel, opposite correction — and if you also poured the Whissin list, remember that bottle is a sweet concentrate needing three parts water. This one is neither sweet nor concentrated.
Then: why some 0.0% cocktails taste flat — and the four fixes
Alcohol carries texture, warmth and length. Take it out and put nothing back, and a drink reads as juice in a nice glass. Four levers solve it, and every recipe below pulls at least two.
- Texture. The lever that matters most here, and the one this whole list is organised around. Carbonation, dairy fat, egg, unfiltered juice, molasses. Weight is what is missing.
- Bitterness. Roasted rather than herbal — coffee, cacao, cola's own bitter edge. Gentian and quinine fight this bottle; roasted bitterness meets it exactly where it already lives.
- Acid. Lemon and orange. The orange on the finish is real, and citrus oil is the cheapest way to extend it.
- Salt. A pinch in shaken drinks, a few drops of saline in stirred ones. It rounds sourness and lifts the caramel notes off the floor.
One principle decides which classics survive: drinks with several ingredients adapt far better than minimalist, spirit-forward ones. A cobbler or a milk punch has plenty of places to hide. A stirred drink has none — which is why the stirred one is last, with instructions.
1. Whiskey & Cola, done properly
50ml Monday Whiskey · 150ml full-sugar cola · lime wedge · wide orange peel
Fill a tall glass to the top with hard ice. Whiskey first, then the cola poured slowly down the inside of the glass. Squeeze the lime in and drop it. Express the orange peel over the surface and add it.
Why it works: the producer names cola as a pairing, and there is a real reason beyond habit. Cola is doing three jobs at once here — it carries genuine viscosity, it brings phosphoric acid, which is sharper and more cutting than citric, and it has a caramel-and-spice profile that is already a close cousin of the bottle. Use full-sugar rather than diet: this is the one drink on the list where sugar is not the correction but the body itself, and the artificially sweetened version is thin in exactly the way you are trying to avoid. The orange peel is not garnish — it meets the orange note on the finish.
2. The Cold Brew Highball
50ml Monday Whiskey · 100ml cold brew coffee · 50ml soda water · orange twist
Build over plenty of ice, whiskey and cold brew first, soda last. One gentle stir. Long orange twist.
Why it works: roasted coffee is listed on the palate of this spirit, so this is not a contrast, it is an amplification. Cold brew rather than espresso or drip is the important part — brewing without heat extracts far less of the harsh acidic compounds, so what you get is body and roast without sourness fighting the caramel. The soda keeps it from turning heavy. This is the closest thing on the list to a proper afternoon drink.
3. The Bourbon Cider
50ml Monday Whiskey · 120ml cloudy apple juice · 15ml lemon juice · cinnamon stick · apple fan
Build over ice in a tall glass, stir, drop in the cinnamon stick and leave it there while you drink.
Why it works: cloudy, unfiltered apple juice rather than clear — that is the entire recipe. The suspended solids in cloudy juice give it a genuine weight that clear pressed juice does not have, and weight is the thing this bottle is short of. Apple and molasses are a natural pairing, the lemon keeps the juice from going flabby, and the cinnamon releases slowly rather than all at once the way ground cinnamon would.
4. The Whiskey Cobbler
60ml Monday Whiskey · 2 orange slices · 4 raspberries · 10ml demerara syrup · crushed ice · mint bouquet
Press the orange slices and raspberries gently in the base of the glass with the syrup. Add the whiskey, then pack the glass with crushed ice and churn with a bar spoon until the outside frosts. Mound more crushed ice on top and plant a bouquet of mint in it.
Why it works: the cobbler is the oldest drink on this list and the most forgiving, because the fruit and the ice are doing the structural work rather than the spirit. Crushed ice keeps dilution moving as you drink, so the drink opens up instead of flattening out. Demerara rather than white sugar syrup is deliberate — it is molasses-based, so it adds weight and echoes the bottle rather than just sweetening it. You drink through the mint, so the aroma lands before the liquid does.
5. The Ward 8
50ml Monday Whiskey · 20ml lemon juice · 20ml orange juice · 10ml grenadine · pinch of salt · orange twist
Shake everything hard with plenty of ice for a full 12 seconds. Double-strain into a chilled coupe. Express an orange peel over the surface.
Why it works: a Boston classic from the 1890s, and the only drink in the sour family that splits its acid between two citruses rather than leaning on lemon alone. That split is why it suits this bottle: straight lemon is sharp enough to expose how dry the spirit is, while the orange rounds it and picks up the orange already on the finish. Use real pomegranate grenadine rather than the red syrup sold under that name — genuine grenadine is tart and slightly tannic, and the tannin is grip you cannot get any other way here.
6. The Hot Toddy
50ml Monday Whiskey · 150ml hot water · 15ml molasses syrup · 15ml lemon juice · 3 cloves · star anise · lemon wheel
Warm the glass with hot tap water first and tip it out. Stud the lemon wheel with the cloves. Combine everything with water that is hot but well off the boil, and let it stand two minutes before drinking.
Why it works: this is the only warm drink across our whole recipe collection, and the reason it is here is technique rather than novelty. Aroma reaches you as vapour, and the job alcohol does in a spirit is to carry that vapour up out of the glass. Remove the alcohol and the aromatics stay dissolved in the liquid where your nose cannot reach them. Heat does the same job by another route — it volatilises them directly. That is why a 0.0% spirit can smell twice as expressive warm as it does cold, and it is a trick worth knowing well beyond this recipe. Keep the water off the boil: boiling water scorches the citrus and drives off the delicate notes along with the rest.
7. The Bourbon Milk Punch
50ml Monday Whiskey · 90ml whole milk · 15ml demerara syrup · few drops vanilla extract · grated nutmeg
Shake everything except the nutmeg hard with ice for 12 seconds. Strain into a short glass over fresh ice. Grate nutmeg generously over the top.
Why it works: a New Orleans breakfast drink, and the most direct answer on this list to the problem at the top of the page. Milk fat coats the palate in a way sugar simply cannot, so the drink has real substance without becoming sweet — which is exactly the correction this bottle wants. Whole milk, not skimmed; the fat is the recipe. Vanilla is there because it shares aromatic compounds with the barrel notes the spirit is imitating, so it reinforces the butterscotch rather than adding a new flavour. Grate the nutmeg fresh over the surface, where you will smell it on every sip.
8. The Revolver
60ml Monday Whiskey · 15ml coffee-molasses syrup · 3 drops saline · flamed orange peel · one large cube
For the syrup, dissolve 50g demerara sugar and a tablespoon of molasses in 50ml of hot strong coffee, then cool it completely. Stir the whiskey, syrup and saline over ice for 25 seconds and strain over one large cube. Cut a broad coin of orange peel, hold a lit match just above the drink, and squeeze the peel sharply through the flame so the oils catch.
Why it works: a modern San Francisco classic, normally bourbon with coffee liqueur and orange bitters. There is no 0.0% coffee liqueur worth using, so the syrup rebuilds it from first principles — and it turns out better, because you control the sugar and can push the molasses up to meet the spirit. Flaming the peel is not showmanship: the heat caramelises the citrus oils as they hit the surface, which lands a toasted-orange aroma right where this bottle's finish already goes. Keep the flame small and the peel close.
9. The Whiskey Flip
50ml Monday Whiskey · 1 whole egg · 15ml demerara syrup · pinch of salt · grated nutmeg
Dry-shake the egg, whiskey, syrup and salt with no ice for a full 20 seconds — longer than feels necessary. Add ice and shake hard for 15 more. Double-strain into a small chilled wine glass, no ice. Nutmeg over the top.
Why it works: the flip family is older than the cocktail itself, and it is the texture lever taken as far as it goes. A whole egg is doing something a foam cannot: the yolk emulsifies into the drink and produces genuine viscosity all the way through, not just a head sitting on top. Poured up with no ice, it stays thick from the first sip to the last. This is the closest a 0.0% spirit gets to the mouthfeel of something barrel-aged, and it is worth making once purely to feel what the bottle is missing everywhere else. The long dry shake is the whole technique — cut it short and the egg stays stringy instead of turning silky.
10. The Black Manhattan — the hard one, and why
60ml Monday Whiskey · 25ml Melati Botanical Aperitif · 5ml molasses syrup · 3 drops saline · orange twist
Stir with plenty of ice for a full 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express a broad orange peel over the surface and drop it in.
Why it is hard, and why this version works: every other drink here had bubbles, fat, fruit or heat to lean on. This one has nothing but two liquids and cold, and it exposes the gap at the top of this page completely — a nose full of butterscotch arriving at a palate with no sugar in it anywhere, and now a bitter aperitif on top of that. Three corrections, all needed. The 5ml of molasses syrup is the smallest measure in this article and the most important: it is there for weight, not sweetness, and at that volume you will not taste it as sugar at all — you will taste the drink stop feeling hollow. Stir far longer than feels right, because dilution is the only body the glass gets otherwise. Add saline, 1g of salt dissolved in 10ml of warm water, which pulls the caramel notes up where the bitterness would otherwise bury them.
(This is deliberately not the Manhattan on our Whissin list, which pairs whiskey with a sweet vermouth — a much more forgiving drink, because the vermouth brings the sugar with it. Nor is it Amber's Boulevardier, which has three components to balance. Two dry ingredients is the harder problem.)
What this list actually needs
Nine of these ten need nothing but the bottle, ice, and things already in the kitchen — cola, coffee, apple juice, milk, an egg, a lemon. Only the last one reaches for a second bottle, and it wants Melati for genuine bitterness.
The one thing worth making in advance is demerara syrup: equal weights demerara sugar and hot water, stirred until clear, kept in the fridge. Four of these drinks use it, and with a spirit this dry it does more work than plain white sugar syrup ever will.
If you want the smoky end of the 0.0% whiskey shelf rather than the sweet-and-roasted end, Mahala Amber is the other direction entirely — oak and woodsmoke where this one has coffee and molasses.
Shop Monday Whiskey → · Melati →
Pouring something else? Ten built on Mahala Amber → · Ten built on Whissin → · Ten built on Monday Gin →
