What’s behind all the buzz about non-alcoholic beer?

There’s nothing quite like the third swig of a gin and tonic at the end of a long summer’s day. Or of an Old-Fashioned combating Old Man Winter’s chill. The bite on the tongue. The slow burn in the belly. The gradual easing of emotional and physical tension.

Except for the hangovers. There’s nothing quite like those, either. As I — sigh — age, I’ve developed a relationship with alcohol that has become increasingly love-hate: I love it, it hates me. A slight intolerance to booze, German/Irish heritage notwithstanding, has always given me a rosy flush that on round three deepens to an unflattering scarlet that could be mistaken for theatrical rouge. These days, two craft IPAs have groggy, stuffed-up me downing ibuprofen the next morning along with my extra-large coffee and existential crisis.

So I have been intrigued by the rise of non-alcoholic alternatives for the “sober-curious” crowd. I’ve dabbled in zero-proof spirits, which are decent when mixed with the usual suspects, but I think might still constitute a venial sin. Non-alcoholic beer, though? Not buying it.

I tend to agree with the sentiment that if we drank alcohol for the taste, we’d be pouring non-alcoholic Maker’s Mark on our cereal. And if you crave the taste of alcohol that much, you might have a drinking problem, which I think would make beer without the buzz extra aggravating — “Like smoking without inhaling,” as the Some Like It Hot line goes.

Hitherto, my only awareness of NA beer was through my parents’ handyman, Sam, presumably a recovering alcoholic, who drank cases of O’Douls starting at daybreak. Lately, though, non-alcoholic versions of Budweiser, Guinness, Sam Adams (with Yuengling appearing to be the big-name exception) are everywhere. Sales are surging. “New, better-tasting zero-alcohol beers are experiencing explosive growth as alcohol consumption by young adults declines,” reported the Wall Street Journal in October 2023.

Yet still I asked myself… why? If you’re declining to drink, you and your friends are presumably not hanging out in bars, so what does mock-moonshine matter? Is it really for the taste? Aren’t there tastier NA options out there, like, say, lemonade? Coca-Cola? Or the ultimate headscratcher: “NA White Claw,” also known as… seltzer water.

I asked my drinkingest friends their thoughts on the appeal of NA beer, expecting them to join me in Gen Z mockery. But many of them said they do enjoy the taste of beer and crave it (I’ll blame long Covid), but for one reason or another — solidarity with a perpetually pregnant wife, mental health preservation, etc. — choose the responsible route. Fair enough. Though a kindred spirit provided a more satisfying response: “Ah, yes, you know, I really wish there were a way to have the shit taste of beer without any of the ‘having fun’ nonsense afterward.”

Jeremy Lott, children’s book author and former liquor-store owner, points out that “non-alcoholic beer” is slightly off — most contain a little bit of alcohol. “They are simply brewed in such a way as to have very low alcohol content that would have to be consumed in truly massive quantities to get you drunk” — which explains Handyman Sam’s habits.

It also explains why proofnomore.com, which sells “non-alcoholic” beverages, confirms that you’re twenty-one years old before allowing you to enter the site. I was also carded when I bought a six-pack of non- alcoholic Blue Moon at my local beer store. Asking for the non-alcoholic section made me feel… like an alcoholic. As did cracking open a can at high noon and sitting on my porch with the sudsy brewski in plain view.

Still, I’ll agree with Jeremy that the NA Blue Moon, like the non-alcoholic Kolsch he accidentally ordered on an Alaskan flight for $8.50, “wasn’t awful.” It was kind of watery, with a slight bite, and the effervescence was fun. But it cost about the same as regular Blue Moon, which various sources report is because overhead and production costs for NA beer are the same, but the batches are smaller.

Here’s what I discovered, though: the very act of pouring the beer into a glass and sitting down to relax with it revealed itself to be a ceremony that has a calming, switching-gears effect on me. And though it irks me to admit it, the fact that it tasted like beer triggered a Pavlovian reflex to relax. And drinking an NA beer (in a glass, obviously) at a social gathering when everyone else is hitting the hard stuff could make a person feel less self-conscious and more attuned to the group, like I did as a kid drinking Shirley Temples alongside my parents’ whisky sours.

I drank three fake Blue Moons over the course of about an hour, and I did feel more zen at the end. Maybe that’s the combined “less than 0.5 percent alcohol” taking its toll on a lightweight. Or maybe it’s simply the art of taking some time to focus for once on a single pleasure.

Yet this can be done with most any beverage, most of which taste better and are less expensive. My social experiment in the world of NA beer brought me a newfound empathy for NA-beer drinkers, but solidified my firm agreement with my pregnant friend, who, offered a Heineken 0.0, responded, “No thanks. I’m not that desperate.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2024 World edition.