A recent thread on Bluesky about the Chrysanthemum casts this matter in stark relief.
The Chrysanthemum is a drink that contains only alcoholic ingredients: vermouth, Benedictine and absinthe. All too typically, Punch blithely characterizes the drink as “low proof” simply because it is not high proof. This is truthiness at work, and it’s one degree separated from the mistaken notion that the Chrysanthemum is a drink of negligible alcoholic content. The truth is that the Chrysanthemum is a drink of medium alcoholic strength and, indeed, of medium ABV (although the latter is, again, an indication of flavor concentration/dilution, not overall strength/toxicity).
Current industry language employs two binaries:
alcoholic vs. non-alcoholic
This is a legitimate binary, because a drink either contains alcohol or it does not, and that matters. This binary is self-evident.
alcoholic vs “low alcohol”/“low ABV”
This binary is bogus, because the quantity of alcohol in an alcoholic drink is continuously variable depending on formula and serving size. The subtext of both “low alcohol” and “low ABV” is that the alcohol in these drinks doesn’t matter, doesn’t count. This bogus binary is—quite literally—dangerous, because it obscures that these drinks almost always do contain significant alcohol and it sets people up to drink too much.
Again, my advocacy is that mixed drinks on all menus be annotated with the calculated decimal quantity of standard drinks that a particular rendition presents. This is an easy scalar—a simple number like 1.3 or 0.8—that anyone can relate to both to compare choices on the menu, and to tally up the number of drinks they’ve actually consumed in a session. Such a number is no more a typographic burden than the price.
I am certainly not opposed to additional annotations provided they are not designed to foster confusion. Total oz of alcohol would be educational. ABV would actually be useful because once you get a sense of it, the number further clarifies the experience of a drink more than keywords like “stirred” or “long” or what have you.