Hi! We are Jennie & Max and founded the Mindful Drinking Club in early 2021, a shop, showroom and workshop space based in Berlin. What looks like a wine shop from the outside is actually the opposite: we offer everything but a lot of alcohol, because our focus is on non-alcoholic alternatives! No matter if you never or rarely drink alcohol anyway, just want to try something new, or are looking for a gift for your pregnant girlfriend (by the way, we also do private tastings): With us, you’ll find a curated selection with products from common categories, like non-alcoholic spirits, non-alcoholic sparkling wine or non-alcoholic beer, but you can also go on a journey of discovery and get to know completely new tastes and drinks, from Kombucha to Sparkling Tea and Verjus, to Wine Proxies and Shrubs or Oxymels. We have them all: non-alcoholic alternatives for every taste and occasion!
And maybe we don’t have them all together, because opening a store during a global pandemic might be considered a boozy idea by some. The Mindful Drinking Club as it exists today is actually a Corona baby. Although I (Jennie, full name Jennifer Kießling a.k.a. Pairing Is Caring) have been involved in the development of non-alcoholic alternatives and pairings for several years, and I didn’t exactly want to open a store like this, especially not this quickly. Because at the end of 2019, my business in Zurich, with which I developed non-alcoholic beverages for restaurants, advised gastronomers, gave lectures and hosted workshops, was just about to really take off. Interest in the topic of alcohol-free alternatives grew, more and more inquiries and orders fluttered into my test kitchen, several events were planned for the first half of 2020. And then came Corona. No workshops, no gastronomy, nothing involving people at all. Unlucky. Very unlucky.