A good alcohol-free beer is a second brew of the same wort, and the brewers doing it well treat it that way rather than as a reduced version of the original. The three routes on offer are dealcoholizing a fully fermented beer by removing the alcohol after it has been made, brewing with a yeast that does not make much alcohol, and mashing and boiling the wort in a way that keeps it from ever producing a fermentable strength worth removing. Each one changes what the beer can taste like, and the third is the only one that gives you hops in the finished glass. Everything good about the current crop comes down to those choices plus the willingness to treat the beer as its own product, with its own grain bill and its own hop schedule, instead of a compromise poured into the same bottle as a 5.5 per cent pale ale.
What The Label Can And Cannot Tell You
Start with the percentage, because it is the one number on the front label that is always accurate. In Canada, beer at 0.5 per cent alcohol or less falls outside the federal definition of beer altogether, which is what a shop is describing when it lists a beer as non-alcoholic or dealcoholized, the same as alcohol-free or NA on a shelf. Anything above that is beer carrying some alcohol, and the word low alcohol on a can is marketing language rather than a regulated category you can rely on. What the number does not tell you is how the beer was made, how it tastes, or what it cost to produce. A dealcoholized 0.4 per cent lager, a naturally fermented 0.4 per cent pale ale, and a lightly hopped 1.1 per cent session beer can all sit next to each other on the same shelf and be entirely different drinks.
It is also worth saying plainly what this category is not. Removing the alcohol from beer does not make the remaining liquid a health product, and nobody should be told it does. Beer without alcohol still contains calories from the residual sugars and the fermentable extract that stayed behind, it is not a sports drink, and treating it as a way to drink more without consequence is a mistake. The honest case for the category is much narrower and is entirely about taste, since a genuinely well made alcohol-free lager is simply a good clean lager that happens to be under 0.5 percent, and there are people in a province with a long, cold, wet winter for whom that is a real and legitimate thing to want.
The Three Ways To Make It
| Method | How it works | What the beer tends to taste like |
|---|---|---|
| Dealcoholized after fermentation | Beer is brewed normally, then the alcohol is stripped out and the water put back | Heavily hopped, hop oil prominent, sometimes solvent-like |
| Low-alcohol fermentation | An attenuated or unusual yeast ferments most of the sugar, then the beer is chilled to stop it before it finishes | Round, very drinkable, softer and less sharp |
| Limited fermentation | Mash and boil the wort so it reaches only a low strength, then stop | Light body, low gravity, the weakest of the three |
The dealcoholized route is the one most of the best known brands use, and it is the one that has improved the fastest. The technical problem is that ethanol and water are very difficult to separate, so for a long time the process also pulled out or damaged the compounds that give beer its character, which is why early alcohol-free versions often had a thin, papery, solvent note that read as an absence rather than a drink. Vacuum distillation and reverse osmosis now recover the volatiles that matter and return them, which is the technical reason a current dealcoholized lager can be clean and crisp instead of papery, and it is also the reason it remains expensive, since running a vacuum column or a membrane rig at taproom scale is not cheap. If a bottle at that end of the shelf tastes thin and faintly of pear drops or nail varnish remover, that is what happened.
The low-alcohol fermentation route takes a different trade. A brewer picks a yeast that attenuates unusually far, ferments the wort to be as dry as possible, and then chills it hard to kill the yeast before it converts what little sugar is left into alcohol. Because the yeast is still doing most of its normal job, the beer goes through the same steps as any other and picks up the same esters and the same conditioning, so the result is usually the softest and most approachable of the three and the one that most people find easiest to drink over a long evening. It also tends to be the version that keeps more of the malt-derived flavour, since there is no aggressive stripping step to take the delicate compounds with it. What it gives up is control, because the yeast is making the strength decision for you.
Where The Real Skill Is Going In
The hard part of the category is not stripping alcohol, it is hops, and this is the single biggest difference between a good alcohol-free beer and a bad one. Hop character lives almost entirely in volatile oils, and a dealcoholization step takes a portion of those out along with the ethanol, which is why so many alcohol-free IPAs taste of a whisper of citrus rather than of a hop. The brewers getting this right are doing one of three things. They are hopping the finished beer with a dry hop or a post-fermentation addition, so the aromatics land after the alcohol has been taken out and stay in the glass. They are using a hop product that carries aroma rather than bitterness, such as a concentrated or oils-based addition, at a rate that would ruin a full strength beer but reads as restrained and correct in one under 0.5 percent. Or they are accepting that the beer cannot be a hop-led IPA and building it as a clean, crisp, pale lager instead, which is the honest and increasingly common choice and the one the best examples of the category have made.
The second thing careful brewers do is adjust the grist, since the mouthfeel that normally comes from alcohol and from a fuller attenuation profile is simply missing, and a thin alcohol-free beer is watery in a way that reads as a fault rather than as lightness. A small amount of a demerarized or a crystal malt adds body and a touch of sweetness that covers the gap, and a small amount of unmalted wheat or rye in the mash gives a slight haze and a fuller mid-palate. A brewing programme for a lower-alcohol beer is not a standard recipe run to an earlier endpoint, since fermenting a thin wort hard to dryness gives thin beer, and a brewery that wants body has to put more into the wort to begin with.
The third thing is water, and it is the one that costs nothing. Alcohol contributes to the impression of heat and body, so when it is removed or kept very low, the balance of the finished beer shifts and the mineral content of the water suddenly matters much more than it does in a 5 percent beer. A brewers without a working feel for their water gets a thin, slightly metallic or chalky result out of the dealcoholized route and has no obvious place to fix it. Getting the sulfate to chloride ratio and the pH right for a low-strength beer is ordinary brewhouse work that simply has to be done more carefully than the same brewery would bother with on a full-strength pale ale.
How To Buy One That Is Worth The Money
Most of what determines whether you like an alcohol-free beer you can read off the can before you open it. The word malted barley, wheat, rye or oats tells you the base is real, whereas a can that lists only water, malted barley and hops is generally the cleaner-tasting option and a can listing a long run of natural or artificial flavourings is usually masking a thin base. The list of hops tells you the beer is meant to be hop-led, and if the style on the front says lager, pilsner, blonde or golden rather than IPA, pale ale or pilsner, the brewery has told you plainly that the beer is built on malt and fermentable character instead, which for this category is a sensible and enjoyable thing to buy.
- Check the percentage on the can, since anything under 0.5 per cent is the true alcohol-free category and anything above it will have a little more alcohol in it, whatever the label calls it.
- Look for a named hop varietal on the label, since a beer naming a specific hop is telling you the brewery thought about the aroma rather than only the bitterness.
- Expect a clean, crisp lager to be the strongest thing in the category, and treat any beer trying to be a hop-led IPA with more caution, because that is the hardest thing to do without alcohol.
- Be suspicious of a very low price, since the dealcoholization equipment is expensive to run and the cheapest versions in a cooler's mix tend to be the ones with the most processing and the least grain.
- Store it cold and drink it cold, since without any alcohol or carbonation to protect it, a warm can of a light lager goes flat and dull quickly in a way a regular beer will not.
- Expect the range to be improving quickly, and to check a new brewery or a new release before deciding the category is not for you.
Taste It As Beer First
The right way to judge one of these is to forget that it has no alcohol and just drink it as beer, which sounds obvious but is the thing people most often fail to do. If it is thin, if it tastes of nothing, or if there is a solvent or papery note underneath the hops, then that is a bad alcohol-free beer and no amount of intention will make it a good drink. If it is clean, well balanced, faintly sweet and finishes properly, then it is a good lager and the fact that it is under 0.5 percent is beside the point, since the whole argument for buying it is that you want a beer and this one supplies one. Our earlier explainer covers what non-alcoholic beer was, and it is worth reading alongside this one, because the category moved a long way in a short period. If what you actually want is a beer you can drink through an evening and not the next morning, that is a different article, and the honest version is that a genuinely low-alcohol brewed beer in the range just under 3.5 percent will usually satisfy you better than anything under 0.5.
