Will Non-Alcoholic Beer Find an Audience?
In Germany, non-alcoholic beer is big business. It’s currently 7% of the overall market, and will likely hit 10% in the next few years. It’s a large enough cultural force that many mid-sized breweries have added equipment to make it, and it’s found in most restaurant and bars where it’s routinely ordered by regular people. There are around 500 different NA beers available. In the United States, by contrast, the market is only around a million barrels—one half of one percent of the total market. For decades, the offerings have been atrocious, few, and tend to gather dust on the back shelf waiting for someone to order them—when they are available in the first place.
Clearly, the US has some room to grow.
The biggest barrier is on the supply side. Unlike Germany, there are very few non-alcoholic alternatives, and they’re the same old brands that have been kicking around for decades. Even before craft brewing changed our sense of what beer should taste like, the legacy non-alcoholics were bad, but now the step from a good IPA down to Clausthaler is really steep. I think many of us fixed in our minds the idea that NA beer is categorically doomed—that is, it’s not possible to make decently pleasant examples—and we’ve never revisited it.
Of course, the Germans aren’t converting drinkers with terrible beer. Here in the US, we’re finally starting to see new wave craft breweries make credible versions of pale ales and stouts without the booze. A year and a half ago, Patrick and I interviewed Bill Shufelt and John Walker of Athletic Brewing (Connecticut) on the podcast, and last week I got a shipment from Surreal Brewing in California. Both are making impressive non-alcoholics that are very much in the flavor profile of craft beer. They’re by no means identical recreations, but judged on their own merits, they’re flavorful and accomplished. They may not be able to perfectly impersonate alcoholic beer, but they’ve been made to be balanced, tasty alternatives that scratch the beer itch.
Finding an Audience
Culture is inexplicable, and going back to the Germany/US dichotomy, it seems curious that a country so highly associated with beer would be more willing to drink non-alcoholic beer than one with a Puritan hangover like ours. But perhaps that’s just the issue. We have binary approach to alcohol (yes or no) and haven’t yet seen the ways people in other countries consume NA.
Athletic co-founder Bill Shufelt gave us our first hint of a non-binary approach on the podcast when he described his own interest. “There was a point when I was getting more healthy and active and drinking on nights and weekends was interfering with my professional life and my fitness.” Non-alcoholic beer is hydrating, has some beneficial nutrients, and is low in alcohol. Athletic’s beers run from 50-100 calories, and Surreal’s are even lower—17 to 50 calories. They don’t have to replace beer entirely, but reduce some of its downsides.
As a consequence, it has broad appeal, and not just among graybeards. “It’s something we thought would be a thirty-plus beverage—and all the way up in ages to where it was a medical requirement,” Shufelt told us. “We’ve been surprised by how young the demographic of people drinking our beer is. Millennials are very worried about their social image, their professional careers, and how any sort of drinking mistake could end up on social media. And they’re very health-focused.”
He acknowledged that the main demo are in their thirties and forties, but he has learned that the binary thinking is just wrong.
“I would say our main demographic is … people who enjoy the premium beverage of craft beer on occasions when they can’t drink. [It’s not] an either/or proposition.”
In preparation for this post, I ran a highly unscientific poll on Twitter that was revealing. Just over a third of the 1236 respondents (36%) said they’d never drink non-alcoholic beer. More—37%—said they’d drink it sometimes or often if it tasted good and was the same price as regular beer.
The reasons people cited in comments varied—health, alcohol, medical condition (pregnant and nursing women, anyone?), and calories—but most didn’t require drinkers to draw a hard line between regular and non-alcoholic beer. Like Shufelt says, it’s occasion-based. A third of regular beer drinkers (my twitter community) occasionally or often drinking NA beer suggests it’s potentially a big market. Perhaps not Germany-big, but a lot bigger than it is now.
For my own purposes, I am a fan. An ideal session to me is three or four beers. That’s the amount of time it takes for me to settle in and enjoy myself. The trouble is, my body very much wants a limit of two beers, and punishes me when I exceed it. I’ve found non-alcoholic beers to be a perfect solution; I just alternate boozy and alkoholfrei. As a bonus, I’m actually limiting the damage of the two regular beers because I’m hydrating in between. I hope to see more of these come on line in coming years so that a handle or two are devoted to them at my local pub.