I HAVE A MINOR COMPLAINT: N/A Beer Still Not a Deal

Brewers Association economist Bart Watson posted the above graph on Twitter. He was pointing out that although non-alcoholic (N/A) beer got a bigger bump during dry January this year, it has also fallen back more. I notice something else. The non-alcoholic segment is growing—something on the order of 30% in the 18-month span of Bart’s chart. Six million more results appear on Google searches for “nonalcoholic” beer since Jan 2022 (a 300% jump), and this style has been the buzz of the industry for years. And not for nuthin’, Athletic Brewing has quickly rocketed to success, becoming the 23rd largest brewery in the country.

However, if I could direct your attention to the Y axis of the chart, please have a gander at the figures. In October 2022, N/A was six-tenths of a percent of overall beer volume, and in March it was … around eight-tenths of a percent. A tiny volume and it’s still barely growing!

Non-alcoholic beer may one day become a significant percentage of overall beer sales. For the better part of a decade this was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, however, and it still hasn’t cracked the one-percent mark. In the meantime, multiple N/A beer companies have come on line, as well as countless N/A brands. The press has breathlessly covered the N/A “space” (a broom closet, apparently), and I can’t remember how many articles I’ve read navel-gazing about America’s turn to healthfulness or the way Zoomers are embracing N/A beer. It is all pure hype and it needs to stop. N/A beer is a slow-moving, minuscule segment in the beer industry and I will continue to ignore it until its volume reaches whole digits.

Let me emphasize my pique about this “trend” with the following chart, which includes alcoholic beer along with the N/A numbers from Bart’s chart:

Move along people, nothing to see here.