Curious Elixirs & the Beacon Story

Curious Elixirs is one of those brands that seems like it should be headquartered in Brooklyn or Los Angeles. The packaging is design-school clean, the marketing is NA-lifestyle confident, and the distribution footprint runs from upscale supermarkets to bougie restaurants nationwide. The brand is based, instead, in Beacon, New York, a 90-minute Metro-North ride from Grand Central and one of the unlikely centers of the American non-alcoholic-drink boom.

This is a local-pride profile. What Curious Elixirs is, how it came to be in Beacon, and why the brand's existence reshaped how the Hudson Valley thinks about sober-curious drinking.

What they make

Curious Elixirs produces pre-bottled, shelf-stable non-alcoholic craft cocktails sold in 12-ounce bottles. The line currently runs through five numbered flavors (the "Curious No. 1" through "Curious No. 5" pattern), each built around a different cocktail archetype, a negroni-adjacent No. 1, an ID-reading-amaro No. 3, a spicy paloma-feeling No. 4, and so on.

The recipes use adaptogens and botanicals, ashwagandha, reishi, rhodiola, alongside the more conventional citrus and bitters. This is not a "remove the alcohol, keep the flavor" brand; it's a "build the flavor from the ground up without alcohol" brand. The distinction matters. The drinks don't taste like lesser versions of cocktails they aren't; they taste like their own thing.

The origin story (short version)

The brand was founded by John Wiseman (who goes by JW), who built it out of his Hudson Valley kitchen in 2015 as a reaction to his own drinking pattern, specifically to the feeling that every social gathering defaulted to alcohol and there wasn't a compelling adult beverage option otherwise. The first bottles were filled by hand. The design aesthetic came from the obvious direction: these drinks should look as considered as the cocktails they were replacing.

By the early 2020s the brand was in Whole Foods and on serious restaurant NA menus nationwide. The inflection point was consistent critical coverage in the wellness press and a broader cultural shift toward sober-curious that aligned with the product perfectly.

Why the Valley

The mid-2010s Hudson Valley, with Beacon at its most interesting small-town moment within 90 miles of NYC, was an obvious place for a brand like this to start. Dia:Beacon had shifted the cultural gravity in the mid-2000s; Main Street had filled in with independent restaurants, galleries, and bookshops; and the demographic skewed toward the exact creative-professional audience that would become Curious Elixirs' early customer base. The Valley's combination of design sensibility, food culture, and wellness orientation was the ideal soil for a premium NA cocktail brand to grow out of.

Seven years on, the brand still operates out of Beacon. The offices, the product development, the creative direction, all local.

Where to find it in the Hudson Valley

For a brand headquartered here, Curious Elixirs' distribution is surprisingly selective locally. A few reliable spots:

Rough Draft Bar & Books (Kingston), carries the full line, usually.

The Vault (Beacon), on the NA menu consistently.

Dogwood (Beacon), sometimes by the bottle for takeout.

Beacon specialty retailers — Happy Valley Arcade Bar's adjacent retail space carries bottles occasionally; several Main Street specialty food shops stock the line.

Adams Fairacre Farms, the regional specialty grocer stocks the line across their locations (Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh).

For at-home stocking, online ordering through the brand's website is fastest, direct-to-consumer, ships anywhere in NY.

How to drink them

Three practical notes:

Serve cold, over ice, with garnish. These drinks are built to be served as cocktails. Pouring a bottle warm into a wine glass misses the point. Ice, a proper rocks glass, and a citrus twist or herb garnish, treat them like a finished cocktail.

The adaptogens are notable, not a marketing gesture. The drinks have a subtle functional component, a mild calm or focus effect, depending on the adaptogen blend. This is not a cannabis drink and there's no impairment; the effect is closer to a strong tea. If you're sensitive to adaptogens for any reason, note it.

The bottles are premium-priced. $8–10 retail per bottle, and restaurants charge accordingly. This reflects the ingredient sourcing and small-batch production, but it means Curious Elixirs is a treat, not a Tuesday-night default.

The local spillover

Curious Elixirs being based in Beacon did more than create a successful brand. It signaled to the Valley's broader food scene that non-alcoholic drinks were worth taking seriously. The explosion of mocktail programs at Valley restaurants (see our mocktail programs guide) tracks roughly with Curious Elixirs' rise. The message was: this market is real, local, profitable, and design-forward. Dozens of bars responded.

In that sense, Curious Elixirs is the Hudson Valley's most influential beverage brand of the last decade, not because of volume, but because of the demonstration effect. They proved the thesis.

What's next for the brand

Public signals suggest the brand is expanding the line into adjacent adaptogen and functional-beverage categories. Also likely: continued push into on-premise (restaurants and bars) as the sober-curious audience grows.

If you're ever in Beacon, the brand's physical presence isn't a consumer retail operation, no tasting room as of 2026. But the entire town reads as the kind of place Curious Elixirs came from. Spend an afternoon on Main Street and the lineage makes sense.

Related: The California Sober Guide · Adaptogen Drinks in the Hudson Valley · Best Mocktail Programs