THE GIST
This year has been a mediocre one for beer sales. But amidst the gloom, non-alcoholic (NA) beer has emerged as a niche that’s actually growing—albeit from a very small base of 0.4% of chain retail beer volume three years ago to 0.6% in 2022. Whether it’s retailers expanding their NA selections or mainstream media headlines about an NA beer boom, the message is clear: If breweries get NA beers on shelves now, there’s success to be had in a growing category, especially ahead of Dry January.
But there’s a hitch.
A lack of ethanol in non-alcoholic beer means it’s harder to shelf stabilize than standard beer because it lacks alcohol’s antimicrobial properties.
What makes this a particular challenge is there’s little consensus among beer makers on how to make these beers shelf-stable for long periods of time without forming off-flavors from microorganisms.
With no single agreed-upon process to ensure a shelf-stable product, brewers have taken varied approaches to prevent refermentation or spoilage in their cans—with mixed results.
Additionally, many NA breweries claim their production and quality assurance methods are “proprietary” and won’t share details publicly. So, while NA beer makers continue to tout the category as the next big thing, a minority of brands both large and small have encountered quality issues that have spoiled their beer and—in at least one instance—led to discontinuation of a brand.
The good news is that these issues have not made drinkers sick. But quality problems—and contested advice on how to solve them—potentially hinder the overall growth of a category that is still fighting for mainstream acceptance and more consumer buy-in.
WHY IT MATTERS
As non-alcoholic beer has grown rapidly, there’s plenty of interest from stores to get more brands on shelves and into shopping carts. But a lack of procedural consensus about how producers should stabilize their beers has created speed bumps.
Durango, Colorado’s Bootstrap Brewing discontinued its two NA beers, NA Strapless Golden Ale and NA Strapless IPA, late this summer after less than two years in the market. Co-owner Leslie Kaczeus said via email that “the process we used which made them taste like real beer was just too labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive.” The brewery declined requests for an interview and did not respond to emails seeking further details about the brewing and stabilization process.
Even Deschutes Brewery, the eleventh-largest Brewers Association (BA)-defined craft brewery in the U.S., admits it experienced “some quality control issues over the summer” related to latent carbon dioxide levels in its NA Black Butte Porter. Deschutes isolated and destroyed the affected beer remaining at the brewery or packages sold through its direct-to-consumer program. In addition to the contract brewing partner it was already using for those beers that were recalled, Deschutes sought out a second partner that was able to perform tunnel pasteurization to reduce the risk of future issues.
In the highest-profile recent example of NA beer quality issues, Diageo recalled Guinness 0.0 in the U.K. in November 2020 after announcing it had found “a microbiological contamination which may make some cans of Guinness 0.0 unsafe to consume." It took the company six months to relaunch the product.
Beer, even the kind with alcohol, isn’t always refrigerated through its journey from brewery to drinkers’ homes. It can be stored warm at distributors’ warehouses, retail stores, and in consumers’ pantries for months. The snag for non-alcoholic beer in particular is that ambient temperatures can hasten the proliferation of yeast or bacteria—without any alcohol to impede their growth—leading to off flavors.
Some online reviews from regular consumers have hinted at similar issues.
A RateBeer review of Bootstrap Strapless IPA from October 2021 notes “a bit of off funk.”
A RateBeer review of Untitled Art Non-Alcoholic Hazy IIPA from earlier this month describes it as “Dirty and sour with a mildly foul aftertaste.”
A RateBeer user in September 2021 noted that a can of non-alcoholic Rightside Brewing’s Citrus Wheat was “a bit of a gusher when I popped the can. Kind of unexpected for an NA beer, since that’s usually a function of extra yeast.”
The BA says it was aware of “anecdotal accounts of biological activity” in cans of non-alcoholic beer at retail this summer, but declined to say which breweries were affected. According to Chuck Skypeck, the BA’s technical brewing projects manager, the activity led to a visual change as cans bulged. Contaminant bacteria or residual brewer’s yeast continuing to create carbon dioxide could cause this bulging and create varied, unwanted smells and tastes. Residual fermentation could also potentially cause a higher-than-labeled ABV. This is similar to what happens when sugars in fruit puree interact with living yeast, and in the past, the BA has suggested voluntary market withdrawals or recalls.
Pasteurization is considered the most effective method for eliminating unwanted microbes in beverages and is widely used across many drink categories, including beer. At the most basic level, pasteurization briefly heats liquid to a temperature high enough to kill yeast and bacteria, ensuring longer shelf life and consistent taste. Milk, orange juice, and many beers sold in grocery stores are all pasteurized for this reason.
Some leading NA beer producers, including Athletic Brewing Company and Ceria Brewing Company, say pasteurization is the only reliable method to ensure a totally shelf-stable, non-alcoholic beer. In particular, they tout tunnel pasteurization, which pasteurizes the liquid and its packaging. It’s the most effective solution, but a tunnel pasteurizer is also expensive, at a cost of close to $1 million. Many non-alcoholic beer producers rely on contract packagers (called co-packers) rather than packaging their own liquid; those co-packers may or may not employ tunnel pasteurization. But at an NA-focused panel at the Craft Brewers Conference in May, Ceria Brewing’s co-founder Keith Villa called tunnel pasteurization “a moral obligation” for NA beer producers. (Villa is also the retired founder of Molson Coors’ Blue Moon Brewing Company.)
“It’s an absolute necessity to pasteurize in a beer to protect your customers,” Villa said, as quoted by ProBrewer. “You got to do it, no questions about it. And if you don’t do it, I would just say shame on you.”
Athletic Brewing’s co-founder and CEO Bill Shufelt agreed with Villa during the discussion, and says that tunnel pasteurization is the best way to completely ensure total safety of non-alcoholic beer.
“In package, there’s almost no way to do it without tunnel pasteurization,” Shufelt says.
For breweries that can’t afford tunnel pasteurization, it’s not clear what the next-best option is. Shufelt says Athletic is “trying to do a lot of industry leadership, especially on sharing learnings on food safety, quality, regulatory, etc.” Not all breweries are so open: Larry Sidor, co-founder and master brewer at Crux Fermentation Project in Bend, Oregon, told the Brewing Industry Guide earlier this year that he receives multiples calls each week from brewers and researchers asking him about his methodology and equipment for brewing NØ MØ Non-Alc IPA. He keeps those guarded.
“One of the phone calls I received was from a brewing professor, and he was asking me some hard questions that I was refusing to answer,” Sidor told the Brewing Industry Guide.
Whether they’ll discuss their own methods or not, not every non-alc beer maker agrees with Villa and Shufelt on the superiority of tunnel pasteurization. Some critics of pasteurization say the process zaps flavorful compounds from beer and results in a product with less taste. Others say the biggest NA beer manufacturers champion tunnel pasteurization as a gatekeeping measure to keep smaller producers with less funding out of the game.
“What’s a craft brewery to do? Should we just roll over and let the big breweries that can afford pasteurizers sell all of the NA in the world? No,” says Ben Jordan, CEO of ABV Technology, a company that developed its own technology, called the Equalizer, for producing non-alcoholic beer. “Innovation is actively happening in the craft brewery space to bring more cost-effective pasteurization to these folks. In the meantime, excellent shelf stability can be achieved with effective preservation techniques,” Jordan says. Those techniques include chemical stabilization with ingredients like metabisulfite, potassium sorbate, and sodium benzoate. Like standard beer, cold-chain storage is also desirable to keep the highest levels of quality during transportation.
Sidor also disagrees with the idea that pasteurization is necessary to produce quality NA beer. He says Crux does not employ the process for its NØ MØ Non-Alc IPA, which has a shelf life of 120 days.
“While pasteurization is a great tool, it’s a very energy-intensive process that can decrease the flavor shelf life of a beer. Thus, [it’s] not great for the environment or the beer,” Sidor says. “We utilize sound brewing practices and quality assurance procedures to ensure beer stability. We do not harm our beer by pasteurization.”
This debate isn’t new. Its application to NA beer may be novel, but even Louis Pasteur fought to pasteurize beer as far back as 1871. In the last decade, Goose Island Beer Company and Deschutes both had to publicly explain their decisions to pasteurize barrel-aged Stouts to prevent infections. And for years, Anchor Brewing has had to defend its practice of pasteurizing beers, succinctly summing up the controversy thusly: “The notion that flavor is somehow adversely affected by the process is a matter of opinion—and of some debate.”
Even its critics can admit that what pasteurization has going for it is its virtual guarantee of shelf stability. Other processes can be effective, but they’re more variable—and tend to be kept close to the vest. This creates a scenario in which non-alcoholic beer makers give assurances that their processes are just as effective as pasteurization, but also cite “proprietary methods” as a reason for not divulging full details.
It leaves drinkers largely in the dark about how their NA beer is made—but that hasn’t stopped sales of non-alcoholic beer from growing considerably in recent years. Like many other consumer packaged food products, how the NA beer sausage gets made doesn’t seem top-of-mind for the average shopper.
Non-alcoholic beer makers on the whole tend not to share details of their methods and technology as readily as standard beer brewers. Athletic Brewing touts its “proprietary method,” as do Rescue Club Brewing Company, Partake Brewing, and Surreal Brewing Company. This could be a way to keep a leg up on competition and to market a certain brand’s NA beer as superior to others. It also has the effect of shielding the methods of non-alcoholic beer production from public knowledge and scrutiny.
Matthew Osterman, founder of Denver contract brewery Sleeping Giant Brewing Company, which makes both standard and non-alcoholic beers, says this caginess pervades much of the NA beer industry.
“If you talk to traditional brewers about a certain brewing practice, people have their own way of doing something, but on best practices, most of them agree,” Osterman says. “But if you put a dozen folks in a room and ask them about the best way to make NA beer, you’ll have 12 different opinions and they’re all heartfelt opinions.”
Indeed, Osterman himself is guarded about aspects of Sleeping Giant’s non-alcoholic beer production, even as he’s publicly prioritized non-alc beer as a focus for the business in coming years. (He cites non-disclosure agreements with contract partners as a reason he can’t talk about specific beer brands.) Currently, Sleeping Giant has a flash pasteurizer but not a tunnel pasteurizer, though Osterman says he is considering purchasing one in the future. He notes that Sleeping Giant can arrange for brands to have their beer tunnel pasteurized off-site if they so choose, and that the brewery has created a pressurized “pharmaceutical-grade clean room” around its can filler to ensure sterility in packaging. He stands by this combination of methods.
Surreal Brewing’s co-founder Tammer Zein-El-Abedein also cites “pharmaceutical-grade precision” in describing his brewery’s safety standards, but declined to answer whether those involve pasteurization, chemical stabilization, or some other option.
“There are a host of things inherent in both our proprietary process with tight adherence to well-established food production safety standards and protocols (our partners kind of tease us about our pharmaceutical grade precision for SOPs and intensive processes where we examine all brewing systems), along with in-house lab capabilities (including PCR testing) to consistently ensure both safe and delicious beer,” Zein-El-Abedein said via email.
Given widespread confidentiality around non-alcoholic beer brewing methods, industry groups would seem to play a leading role in setting standards. But here, too, establishing firm standard operating procedures is still a work in progress.
The BA, primarily through a subcommittee focused on quality, has issued guidance for craft breweries producing NA beers. In August, it published “Non-alcohol Beer: A Review and Key Considerations,” a five-page document whose introduction reads, in part: “Brewing non-alcohol beers is fundamentally different from producing traditional beers which typically contain inherent barriers that ensure consumer safety and shelf stability.”
Skypeck says the BA has received questions from member breweries about NA beer brewing and packaging, questions that have become more frequent over the course of the past 18 months. The trade group intends to issue more guidance, including a primer on pasteurization and more NA-beer-focused programming at upcoming Craft Brewers Conferences.
“Non-alcohol beer is a new product line for craft brewers with different regulations in certain circumstances,” Skypeck said via email.
While non-alcoholic beer is new for many craft breweries, on the whole, the cat’s now well out of the bag. Breweries small and large, from coast to coast, have debuted NA beers over the past seven years. Anaheim, California’s Bravus Brewing Company was founded in 2015 and purports to be the first dedicated NA craft brewery.
Yet the guidance just released—which does address preservation techniques, including pH control, pasteurization (tunnel and flash), filtration, and chemical preservatives—stops short of recommending any particular method over another.
“Bottom line best practice, whatever the stabilization method used, the effectiveness of that method needs to be validated for every different product,” Skypeck said via email. “No two beverages are created equal. … The pasteurization units required to stabilize a pastry stout will be different from a Helles lager and any other style of craft beer, hence the need for any stabilization process to be validated by the producer.”
The BA document states that it is best practice for breweries to obtain a third-party process review for non-alcohol and low-alcohol beverages because of the differences from brewing standard, alcoholic beer. This review should be provided by a processing authority, which can be found at most state universities as well as private companies. The Association of Food and Drug Officials maintains a list of processing authorities breweries could contact. Marcos Salazar, CEO of the Adult Non-Alcoholic Beverage Association (ANBA), says he doesn’t have a precise figure for the cost of such tests but describes them as “not prohibitively costly.”
This service is merely a suggestion, however. The BA says it does not have information on whether most craft breweries seek out this validation, with Skypeck adding that: “Brewers should be validating the stability of all their products, and many do.”
ANBA is a trade group formed last year to further growth for non-alcoholic beer, wine, spirits, and ready-to-drink beverages. Salazar says that the development of food and safety best practices is “one of the top priorities” for the group. ANBA’s Safety and Industry Standards Committee, chaired by Shufelt, is building out that guidance and hasn’t released it yet. In the interim, ANBA has been connecting members who have questions about stabilization and food safety with more established members who can share knowledge on a one-on-one basis. Salazar says he hasn’t been privy to the specifics of those discussions but believes the topics covered are “much broader than stabilization and cover regulations, etc.”
“Whether it’s regulation or food and safety, a lot of people, before [the creation of] ANBA, have been just figuring it out on their own,” Salazar says. “Our goal in the next few months is to create more of those best practices and guidance that really guides members. … Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page so we’re producing products that are safe and high-quality for consumers.”
When asked why the burgeoning NA beer, wine, and spirits industry—a more than $330 million market in the U.S.— hasn’t already come to consensus on such basic protocol, Salazar says this is the reason the ANBA was formed.
“A few producers were like, ‘This has been needed and we’ve known that we’ve needed an association for years, but we are producers and haven’t had the time,’” Salazar says. “On a number of different fronts, everybody has been operating in a little bit of isolation. There has been some collaboration and sharing, and part of the purpose of ANBA is to have that sharing be more structured.”
Salazar says that once ANBA’s food and safety guidelines are released in 2023, the association will add those quality standards to its Code of Conduct that all producers must abide by in order to obtain and retain membership. It hasn’t yet decided how those quality standards will be monitored. He also suggests that ANBA could in the future create some type of seal, similar to the BA’s Independent Craft Brewer Seal, that indicates membership and adherence with those guidelines. That would potentially ensure to consumers that the beverage manufacturer is meeting certain quality standards.
“Food and safety is one of those core pieces we’ll be working on first and foremost,” Salazar says. “Because it’s so fundamental to the category and the growth of the category.”
New non-alcoholic beer brands have done more to drive consumer interest and retailer attention in the category than anything else: It’s relatively new NA brands that have greatly influenced sales, including NA beers from Athletic, Heineken 0.0, Budweiser Zero, and Lagunitas IPNA. Having a variety of NA beer choices with better flavor than what came before is the hook for the entire category’s growth. Quality concerns would hobble these efforts at a critical inflection point for NA beer.
“The key thing to the category succeeding is that the NA beer experience has to be every single bit as great a reward as other beverage options people are choosing from—in taste, experience, meal pairing, marketing, etc.,” Shufelt says.
Consumer, media, and retailer interest is at an all-time high in the U.S., and there are many drinkers who have yet to try their first non-alcoholic beer. In 2019, a Morning Consult poll found that 46% of U.S. adults over the age of 21 reported having ever tried a non-alcoholic beer or mocktail. Roughly half of drinkers have yet to try their first NA beer, and when they do, they’ll be expecting it to taste as good as it’s been promised to be.
Words by Kate Bernot