Non-Alcoholic Craft Beer Has a Story Problem
Non-alcoholic craft beer has improved a great deal, but the romance—like what fueled conventional craft—lags behind.
by Mark Lafaro
The following article by Mark Lafaro was originally published in June 2023 in Issue 01 of Final Gravity, our print beer zine telling personal, human-centered stories about beer. You can order the print issue here, or subscribe here. This article received an Honorable Mention in the Best Commentary or Criticism category of the 2023 North American Guild of Beer Writers Awards.
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When I made the decision to get sober in 2022, I knew non-alcoholic (NA) craft beer was going to be a part of my journey, but I wasn’t sure how. NA craft beer was practically everywhere, but it didn’t seem to share the same cultural engagement as its alcoholic counterpart. There was something missing, and it wasn’t just the alcohol. Where was the romance? The storytelling? The obsession over process and ingredients? The camaraderie?
Michael Baggs, co-founder and CCO of Mash Gang, a low-and-no alcohol UK-based brewery, agrees there’s a divide between the quality of NA beers and the lack of meaningful cultural engagement surrounding them. “I think that with the ‘lack of romance’ thing, NA does it to itself. We also don’t have that same history of brewing that alcoholic beer does.”
“A lot of NA brands just simply don’t explain enough to the customer,” adds Jordan Loveday, Mash Gang’s co-founder and CEO. “They feel like too much data around hops and grain is going to be off-putting, when people actually like data.”
Both Jordan and Michael attribute at least some of their success to creating excitement around using unusual ingredients and brewing beers that are just as boundary-pushing as their alcoholic craft counterparts.
Mash Gang’s approach is a stark contrast to how the rest of the NA segment typically presents themselves, which is usually mired in bland, safe homogeneity. It’s a paradigm shift: selling people on the possibilities of what NA craft beer can be, instead of focusing on what it’s not. They’re part of a growing group of NA craft brewers doing their best trying to keep the creativity, fun, and camaraderie in their beers. They’re just leaving out the alcohol.
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Back in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., Self Care Brewing out of Olympia, Washington, is employing a similar strategy to Mash Gang.
“What’s cool is we’re able to use the same creativity we do with our regular beers,” says owner Nate Reilly, referring to the alcoholic beers they make for their sister brand, 3 Magnets. “Let’s make these classic English styles with these micro-malted grains to give it that terroir or a melding of styles that would really be interesting. That’s the creativity that we’re really into, and we’re getting noticed for that.”
Tim Owens, the marketing manager for Self Care, echoes Nate’s point.
“The thing we’ve been able to carve out is that from day one we started playing around the edges stylistically and did it with a degree of authenticity that was lacking at the time,” he says.
When pressed for a specific example, he brought up the excitement in Washington around fresh hop beers during harvest season. “If you’re an NA customer, nobody’s making fresh hop IPAs. Well, we did five.”
The cool ingredients and experimentation were there in some NA craft beers, but something else felt off. So much of the marketing around NA craft beer has been centered around active lifestyles, wellness, and recovery. I just wanted something delicious and exciting in my hand. Do I have to be dripping with sweat from finishing an ultra marathon to enjoy a beer from Athletic? While there are obvious benefits to abstaining from alcohol, whether it be for a night or for a lifetime, why is there so much focus on safety and health, and so little on fun? Loveday shares my frustration.
Photo by David Nilsen
“I still like the things I used to when I was younger: I like listening to Slayer, I like downing tins of crispy bois, I like video games. I don’t want to go into a bar or a venue and pick up a drink that immediately apologizes for me not drinking. Fuck you! Drinking a beer called ‘Designated Driver?’ What kind of sadist is walking around with these products?”
Reilly feels the same way, and incorporates this line of thinking into the marketing approach at Self Care.
“It kind of dawned on us that we are the anti-Athletic,” he says. “If you take their customer base and put it on a spectrum with people who are super hardcore athlete types, we’re on the far other end. There you have people who don’t give a fuck about sports, but are really creative. If you take that left half, that’s where we sit.”
The contributions Athletic Brewing have made to the category can’t be denied. When you see ads for Athletic, they aren’t just advertising themselves, they’re advertising and growing awareness for the whole category. To me, it feels akin to the marketing Sam Adams did during an earlier era of the craft beer movement in the 1990s and 2000s.
“We do have to remind ourselves that there needs to be adults in the room if we want to grow bigger,” says Owens, recognizing the value of this broader marketing approach. “But we’re trying to be true to our authenticity.”
For me, this was the missing ingredient in NA craft beer. It wasn’t the alcohol. It was the authenticity. I didn’t want beers that felt like they were the result of dozens of marketing focus groups and had been run through the lens of former Wall Street executives to create the most sterile, inoffensive, bland brands imaginable. I wanted beers with imagination that captured the same magic that brought me to craft beer in the first place.
“One of our biggest goals is to try to make it cool,” Reilly explains. “You can’t just say this is cool and it’s cool. You have to actually do cool shit and hope that it’s cool. Involving musicians, trying to get into festivals in the Pacific Northwest and doing sober bars with them. It’s actually becoming kinda cool to not drink!”
For Malt Gang, they abandoned the approach of trying to have broader appeal to instead lean into the kinds of art and music that they appreciate.
“Instead of using cute artwork on it, let’s use an artist we love that used to be in a grindcore band and make a skeleton with his face melting off,” says Baggs of their labels. “The thing is, people tell us it will never work, but look at Liquid Death. Who doesn’t like skulls?”
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Photo by Mar Lafaro
Recreating the magic and authenticity of the craft beer revolution won’t be easy. After all, it largely started with homebrewing, and until recently I believed there was no such thing as non-alcoholic homebrew culture. I was mistaken.
It's 9:30 AM on a Monday in April in a garage in Asheville, North Carolina. The appropriately-named Josh Brewer is poring over recipe notes and measuring out grain. Today, he’ll be homebrewing an NA IPA with Meagen Anderson, the founder and CEO of (AF)icionado™, which bills itself as the world’s first alcohol-free and non-alcoholic adult beverage training and certification program. I’m along for the ride.
A mutual friend put them in contact with each other over their shared interest in creating high-quality non-alcoholic beer. Josh has a brewery-in-planning, Brewwell, at which he hopes to create a space that focuses on holistic wellness as well as well-crafted beer. His interest in potentially featuring no-and-low beers at Brewwell spurred his interest, leading him to push his own boundaries and learn new processes. Meagen will be giving a speech at Homebrew Con in San Diego in June and wants hands-on experience to aid in her presentation.
Photo by Mark Lafaro
“What do you guys think? Two ounces of C-60, or three?” asks Josh.
We discuss the merits of each option, and eventually settle on three in hopes that it’ll provide some nice color and a richer malt flavor. Meagen and I take turns dumping grain into Josh’s homemade mill. The water reaches the right temperature, and we begin mashing in. The sweet smell of wort fills the air around us. The sunlight of a gorgeous spring day pours through the entrance of the garage, while the sound of bluegrass plays from a bluetooth speaker.
When I ask Josh about where he found the recipe, he explains he created it himself from scratch with the help of some intrepid Australian homebrewers who run a website called Ultra Low Brewing. They have hundreds of low-and-no homebrews under their belt, and were more than willing to share their knowledge and experience to help him craft a recipe. He adds that White Labs, a company providing fermentation cultures for brewers, was also a helpful resource, providing tech sheets and detailed information on methods. It sounds like the same kind of camaraderie that helped fuel the growth of homebrewing in the 1980s.
After sparging and lautering, we start our boil, and begin to add our hops: Cryo Citra and Cascade. Meagen, whose long career in the craft beer industry included several years working for hop cultivators and purveyors, can barely contain her excitement about the possibilities that cryo hops present for non-alcoholic homebrewing. Because NA homebrew recipes often call for smaller quantities of ingredients than alcoholic ones, cryo hops can add more impactful flavor at this scale. We take the obligatory pictures of adding hops to the boil, then leave the boil kettle to do its work while we share some non-alcoholic beers from Industrial Arts and Two Roots on Josh’s deck upstairs. Three beer geeks and industry professionals, two of whom are completely sober from alcohol (Meagen is celebrating over three years of sobriety), compare notes on each beer, sharing war stories from their time in the industry. It made me feel like I was a part of a community again.
The craft beer revolution started just like this: in the kitchens, driveways, and garages of America, and the three of us wonder aloud what better accessibility to making low-and-no alcoholic craft beer at home could mean to the industry. The next generation of great NA brewers could be starting out right now in a garage somewhere. If you’re sober or changing your relationship with alcohol, don’t throw away your homebrew kit just yet.
The NA craft beer market is in its infancy, but it’s growing–and growing up–quickly. Like its alcoholic predecessor, there are major players leading the way, and smaller producers pushing boundaries along the edges. A closer look reveals homebrewers tinkering and experimenting with ways to improve process and flavor. All of the ingredients to recreate what happened with alcoholic craft beer are right there brewing. There are glimmers of hope that we have a much more inspiring, authentic world of NA craft beer on the horizon—one that captures the same kind of excitement that inspired my interest in its alcoholic equivalent. I know that I have at least one to look forward to that I’ll be sharing on a Zoom call with some new friends. It just needs to finish fermenting.