Experiments with Non-Alcoholic Beer

As is well known, I really like beer. I like everything about it. I like the experience of drinking it. I like the taste. I love breweries. In fact, I almost never go to a regular bar. No interest. I have one in my neighborhood I like well enough when I am in the mood, plus I can’t walk to any breweries. But otherwise, just really zero interest. I will go to a taphouse of course, but that’s like a brewery but usually with better food. I like the culture around beer, mostly. Bret Kavanaugh certainly didn’t help the cultural perception of the beverage among your academic liberal types, that’s for sure. But whatever.

In any case, in the last couple of weeks, for various reasons, I have taken a break from all alcohol. But I still really like beer. So the obvious solution was to try non-alcoholic beers. And here’s what I have discovered–I like beer a lot more than I like alcohol. In fact, I don’t really care about the alcohol at all. I certainly don’t need it and haven’t missed it. I can have all the non-alcoholic beer I want and there’s no downside.

But this has been significantly helped by another fact–the quality of non-alcoholic beer has improved immensely in recent years. Athletic Brewing, which only makes non-alcoholic beers, has really changed the game. I’ve bought a few of their six-packs and both of their IPAs are really quite good, as good as many IPAs with alcohol in my opinion. I tried their version of a Mexican lager last night and while it wasn’t my favorite, it is a reasonable facsimile of the brown Dos Equis, so not bad. Luckily, most shows these days will have a N/A choice (well, some anyway and interestingly in my experience more the venues appealing to younger people than to older people; I went to see an older musician last week and was almost the youngest person in the audience and nope, only booze for the boomers!). So at a show this last weekend geared toward a young crowd, I had a few Notch N/A pilsners. Given that Notch does a good job with low ABV beers anyway, makes sense they could do a fine enough job just getting rid of the booze entirely. It was just a pilsner, inherently drinkable but inherently uninteresting, but there’s a big space for that in the world, we don’t need to be microdissecting every beer we have, as fun as it might be to think about hops and such a bunch of the time.

None of this is to say I am going to give up drinking real beer entirely. But I gave up drinking hard alcohol, outside of the occasional cocktail or sip of whiskey once a month, a couple of years ago and didn’t miss it at all. And I never have been a big wine person, though I will have a glass at dinner if it is a special occasion. The main thing I am missing is the sheer variety in styles that I can drink normally. I could really use a tasty sour, let’s put it that way. But I suspect the N/A world is only going to grow and people will provide more varieties and more space on the store shelves will follow. The important thing I have learned, related to the learning that I like beer more than alcohol, is that there is no good reason to have that 3rd or 4th real beer. There’s no upside. So the N/A beers are here to stay, maybe not as the only thing I drink, but as a big part of my drinking choices.