Meet the Parkdale couple creating a virgin cocktail empire

Haritha Gnanaratna was a little different than most waiters: she rarely drinks alcohol.

When he went on his first date with Audra Williams, he was delighted to discover a soulmate – he had a tattoo of a temperance activist and had never drunk alcohol. Behind the bar of the now-closed Mr. Flamingo, he got to work on a creative concoction. “He made me a delicious cocktail of celery cordial, smoked tea, lemon, and agave,” recalls Williams. “And she was so delighted.”

During his decade tending bars, Gnanaratna had always liked making a customer a non-alcoholic drink, but once he and Williams started dating, he realized that few places were willing to serve him something interesting. “It was just a blueberry soda after a blueberry soda,” he recalls.

The couple, now engaged and living together in Parkdale, fell in love quickly, and even quicker to start a business together, deciding within weeks of meeting to start the mocktail brand Temperance Tonics. “I no longer felt that making alcoholic beverages was challenging or attractive, so I decided to master creating amazing non-alcoholic beverages,” says Gnanaratna. “For me, a cocktail is a cocktail. It should be visually appealing and aromatic, and it should engage different parts of your palate. It should inspire curiosity. None of those things require alcohol. “

Gnanaratna and Williams love how every great cocktail has a great story behind it, so they turned to a mystical source for inspiration for their own moonshine libations. “We decided that, for our drinks, we would map them into the tarot,” says Williams. “This has the advantage of currently being in the zeitgeist, as well as having a 500-year history shaping the narrative.”

Local artist Cindy Fan was commissioned to design a tarot deck, filling it with lush watercolor images. From there, Gnanaratna got down to business. “I started looking at the art and thought about how each piece made me feel and what story was being told,” he says. “Then, I selected ingredients that I felt could invoke those emotions and stories for others as well.” Cloves and nutmeg, for example, evoke memories of winter holidays, so Gnanaratna used those flavors in the card-based Temperance cocktail recipe, his version of a raised eggnog. Celery has a fresh, herbaceous feel, he says, bringing renewal to mind. So he used those flavors in the World cocktail, inspired by the change-themed card. Beets and smoked teas, on the other hand, “have an earthy weight that also carries a sense of deep insight and mystery,” which is why those flavors permeate the complex beverage called Hierophant.

The couple’s new book “Temperance: Non-Alcoholic Cocktails Inspired by The Tarot” contains these recipes, along with 19 other Gnanaratna originals featuring flavor profiles ranging from spicy to savory, smoky to sweet. Want some help in mixology? People can buy pre-made kits, complete with basic tonics and pretty garnishes, for cocktails like The Fool, a sparkling lemonade filled with almond-mint orgeat, and Chariot, a heady blend of strawberry and black pepper with a tangy finish.

“Our main motivation is to create a world in which no one feels left out because they don’t drink alcohol,” says Gnanaratna. “Even if you’re not going to drink alcohol for one night.”