A few years ago, you couldn’t get a decent non-alcoholic beer in New Zealand for love nor money, but in the past couple of years it’s turned into the fastest-growing category in the business.
We’ve even got our first dedicated non-alcoholic brewing company, State of Play, which was set up by a guy called Grant Caunter, who gave up beers during the first year of the pandemic because he was so overweight. He was working for Heineken in Europe as their head of craft brewing. He tipped the scales at 145kg and within a year had dropped down to around 100kg and quit his job working for Heineken. He came home and set up State of Play, which brews a non-alcoholic IPA that’s actually rather good.
And that’s the thing about non-alcoholic beers these days — they do taste good.
What swayed Kiwis towards non-alcoholic beer was the introduction of Heineken 0.0. Once that came in and people realised it wasn’t too bad, an appetite for zero ABV beers began to grow.
Most of the big European brands do a reasonable job at zero ABVs, but the
pick of them for me are Peroni 0.0 and Bavaria 0.0 IPA.
But the real flavour difference is created by New Zealand craft breweries, who have developed their own “natural” techniques for brewing non-alcoholic beer (less than 0.5 per cent ABV).
Before the rise of “brew natural” breweries they either stripped out alcohol (and flavour) using something akin to a dialysis machine, or they heated the beer in a vacuum to distill the alcohol, which evaporates at a lower temperature compared with water. Neither of those methods produced a great-tasting product.
But brewers are now able to manipulate their ingredients such as using malts that don’t release much sugar and fermenting with a yeast strain that naturally makes low alcohol. They then go heavy on the hops, for flavour and aroma, as well as the hop oils that help improve the texture of these beers to make them less “watery”.
All in all, the Kiwis have done a great job. Bach Brewing has created two non-alcoholic beers: All Day IPA, and All Day Hazy IPA.
Both are the standouts in the field for me. The hazy in particular is delicious
and it doesn’t feel like you’re drinking a non-alcoholic beer.
Garage Project Tiny (also a hazy) is the other top quality option, while Good George have released their non-alcoholic hazy, called Virtual Reality. It’s not quite as good as the incredible Bach All Day Hazy, but it’s an excellent option. Sawmill do Bare Beer, which is a non-alcoholic pale ale and it’s got a very clean profile and great flavour with a little dollop of bitterness.
Check them out, I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Michael Donaldson
hoppiness.co.nz