Meet the cocktail expert who wants you to try more non-alcoholic drinks

"These brands have created so much sophistication in a bottle."

Yuna Asriyan is the founder of Catchall Collective. Photo courtesy of Yuna Asriyan

January 25, 2023

Dry January may only last one month, but the appeal of non-alcoholic beverages is here to stay, says Yuna Asriyan, founder of Catchall Collective, a women-owned agency that promotes the placement of alcohol-free spirits in restaurants and bars. Asriyan wants to raise awareness that an exquisite cocktail can be enjoyed without a physical toll on the body.

“This is something that’s not going to go away,” Asriyan told Boston.com. “Once people understand how great it is to wake up without a hangover, but also have an amazing time with people and remember how great a night out was — it’s almost as if we’re all growing up.”

Asriyan spent time working in the hospitality industry in Boston before she launched Catchall Collective in 2022. While Catchall has offices in New York, the company works with markets in other cities in the U.S., including Boston. The agency’s services include brand development, education, training, product sales, and event planning. Her goal is to give beverage directors and bartenders high-quality, non-alcoholic options so that they can create premium cocktails.

We talked with Asriyan ahead of her virtual event with Cocktail Club on Thursday, where she’ll show us how to make a classic sour and a spritz life. Below, read our Q&A, and learn about her inspiration for starting her company, her experience in the hospitality industry, and what you’ll love about the spirits she recommends.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

What inspired you to open Catchall Collective?

I’ve been in the industry on both ends of ambassadorship, with alcohol and non-alcohol. For me, I really just love the journey of a night out. I enjoy having some non-alcoholic cocktails. I also really enjoy having some wine; I enjoy having some alcohol. I love a good Vesper. I love a great spritz, without alcohol. If you’re able to incorporate both these amazing things in your night out, [you’re] going to be able to last longer, in terms of being out with your friends, creating these memories that you really hold dear. Especially after a pandemic when we’ve been locked in, these options are for the benefit of the person.

What I wanted to do with Catchall is expose these incredible non-alcoholic brands that are coming to service throughout the world to restaurants and bars that, before Catchall, didn’t really have that much exposure. These brands are located in Scotland, or Italy, or California. I’ve become kind of the person who does a personal litmus test of quality. I don’t love artificial ingredients, so I try to hold on to more of a natural approach with the brands that I work with.

I’ve wanted to bring together a superhero bundle of non-alcoholic beverages and options for restaurants and bars. It was inspired by not wanting to drink a water, or a soda water and bitters, on a night out.

Tell us a bit about what Catchall does, in your own words.

Essentially, what Catchall does is it gives options to beverage directors and bartenders, to create incredible drinks for their patrons. My love of working with founders — I’m able to give them real feedback in real-time. With Prima Pavé, I was telling them how important it would be to create smaller versions, 200-milliliter bottles. … What Catchall does is, it not only works with restaurants and bars, it also works with the brand itself to grow as the market grows. I’m proud of that because working directly with the people who pick the ingredients off of their farm, to direct them to, “Hey, we maybe need a little bit more sugar in this.” Or, “We need to amplify the other ingredients to make it jump out a little bit more.” It’s like a quarterback. It’s being able to direct these incredible brands to success, on one end, and then being able to showcase these brands to restaurants and bars, to amplify their non-alcoholic options.

What I’m seeing a lot of is people trying to use juices and different kinds of teas to create these non-alcoholic cocktails. But what these brands have done is create so much sophistication in a bottle. There’s a very big difference between mixed juices versus non-alcoholic cocktails. When you’re drinking a non-alcoholic cocktail, there’s so much work that has been created to hold this in a bottle, that it doesn’t compare. When you have Prima Pavé in a glass, it tastes just like a sparkling wine. That took years to develop.

How did you become immersed in the world of non-alcoholic beverages?

I was working in genetic research at UMass Medical, working with fruit flies. There was this Buca Di Beppo [nearby]. I wanted to get a part-time job. On weekends, I learned how to bartend there. I completely fell in love with the hospitality aspect of making something for someone and then them enjoying it. Then, layer in the love of delicious things. Creating cocktails, combining all these ingredients, and then making something completely new… I fell in love with that concept. I fell in love with serving people, that instant gratification [and] joy when you bring someone a drink. My roots [in] hospitality were sparked by working part-time as a bartender for a franchise. But that carried on.

I was going to go toward dentistry, but I switched to a flavor chemistry focus. That led me to Boston, working at the Mandarin Oriental at M Bar. When I started working there, it was like all five stars. And it was the first menu I’d ever seen where there were non-alcoholic options. And this was almost ten years ago.

So I always have that notion, that every cocktail menu needs to have a non-alcoholic option. When I became the beverage director for Liquid Art House, I made sure to make one or two of the cocktails non-alcoholic. At that time, we didn’t have these brands that are non-alcoholic to create these things, so I used what I knew. I used juices. I used the ingredients in other cocktails. But every cocktail menu that I had non-alcoholic options on, it would sell.

Prima Pavé is an incredible, non-alcoholic sparkling wine from Italy. It’s completely zero-proof. There is a very big difference between .5% ABV and 0.0%. In this non-alcoholic world, you have to pay attention to the proof, because some people who are pregnant or on certain medications, they really can’t have any alcohol. A lot of brands list .5% as something completely non-alcoholic, but it’s not. I do want to highlight the fact that Prima Pavé is completely 0.0%.

We also have Proxies. It’s a wonderful wine alternative. They use layered blends of fruit, teas, spices, and bitters. It’s specifically designed to pair with food. There are a lot of celebrity chefs like Dominique Crenn who have worked with them.

Feragaia is the first non-alcoholic spirit from Scotland, and I think this one is going to be super popular in the future. They use beautiful things such as black currant leaf, chamomile, lemon verbena, bay leaf, ancho chile, apple, and hibiscus, to really bring these beautiful ingredients together, for a wonderful cocktail.

And of course, there’s The Pathfinder. It’s a fermented, distilled, hemp-based spirit. It’s similar to an amaro, and this one you can really drink by itself, with a glass and ice cube. It’s a complete standout.

Can you tell us a bit about the drinks you will be mixing with Cocktail Club?

The classic sour and the spritz life, we want to keep very simple. These are your beginner cocktails at home. [They use] a few ingredients and they’re going to be really, really tasty. With the spritz and with the sour, we wanted to create something that you can sub out — like instead of Pathfinder, you can use Feragaia. We wanted to create simplicity, but we wanted to create something with delicious results. The spritz and the sour are both classics, and I can’t wait for Jackson and I to create them for everyone. But we wanted to keep things simple. Everyone knows what those are.