amount of alcohol in non alcoholic beer
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Difference between alcoholic and ‘non-alcoholic’ beers
Bars, pubs and supermarkets stock a growing range of alcohol-free drinks and beers, which means it’s easier than ever to cut back your alcohol intake.
If you’ve ever considered cutting back on alcohol, you may have tried switching to alcohol-free or low-alcohol drinks. But what are the differences between alcoholic and alcohol-free beers?
Alcoholic and alcohol-free beers
The main difference between alcoholic and alcohol-free beer is the amount of alcohol they contain. Alcoholic beers have some alcohol in them while alcohol-free beers contain very little alcohol.
By UK law ‘alcohol-free’ beer can contain a very small amount of alcohol (less than 0.05%)
The amount of alcohol in a drink is shown as a percentage of the whole drink. The labels on all alcoholic drinks will show the Alcohol by Volume (ABV). Beer that says 5% ABV on its label contains 5% pure alcohol.
Alcohol labelling
There are four types of categorisation often used on labels:
- Alcohol-free beer = no more than 0.05% ABV
- De-alcoholised beer = no more than 0.5% ABV
- Low-alcohol beer = no more than 1.2% ABV
- Alcoholic beer = contains more than 1.2% ABV
Why does alcohol-free beer contain some alcohol?
Alcohol-free beer does contain a small amount of alcohol (up to 0.05% ABV). This is because some alcohol naturally forms as part of the brewing process.
How is alcohol-free and low-alcoholic beer made?
Manufacturers have two ways of reducing the alcohol content of their beer. They can remove alcohol from the finished product, or make sure alcohol doesn’t form during the brewing process.1
One of the most common methods is to heat the beer to boil away alcohol. Another is to pass the beer through a filter which takes out the alcohol.
Is alcohol-free beer less fattening than alcoholic beer?
Alcohol-free beers do tend to contain fewer calories than alcoholic beers. Drinks also labelled as ‘light’ beers usually have less alcohol and fewer calories.
So, choosing an alcohol-free beer over alcohol, alongside a balanced diet and exercise, could be useful if you’re trying to get rid of your ‘beer belly’ and maintain a healthy weight.
What are the health benefits of alcohol-free beers?
Reduce your risk
Low-alcohol and alcohol-free beers will have fewer alcohol units in them, which means it’s easier to stay within the UK Chief Medical Officers’ (CMO) low risk drinking guidelines, which recommend it is safest not to regularly drink more than 14 units a week. If you regularly drink more than these guidelines, you could be increasing your chances of developing long-term health conditions.
Reduce your calories
Because low-alcohol and alcohol-free beer tends to have fewer calories than alcoholic beer, choosing it over alcohol can reduce your calorie intake as part of a healthy diet.
What if I’m alcohol dependent?
If you’re alcohol dependent or in recovery from alcoholism it is recommended that you do not drink alcohol-free drinks.
This is because alcohol-free beer contains some alcohol and drinking it might cause problems for someone who is alcohol dependent. It could trigger behaviour that makes them want to drink more alcohol or relapse from a recovery.
Fun fact: Some of them still have alcohol in them.
On a warm night recently, my boyfriend and I were seated on a restaurant’s patio, and he ordered a beer. “Jerk,” I muttered.
He looked at me, surprised. I sometimes jokingly lament his ability (or, rather, my lack of ability) to drink hard alcohol, but never beer. Beer was just never that important to me. I’d drink it, of course — that’s how alcoholism works — but it made me feel full faster than it made me drunk, thus it wasn’t very efficient for my purposes.
Which is why I was just as surprised as he was by what came out of my mouth.
Usually, he just laughs when I give him crap about the booze he can drink that I can’t; he understands where it comes from, and that I’m not really mad. This night, however, because it was about beer, he looked at me concerned.
Fun fact: Some of them still have alcohol in them.
On a warm night recently, my boyfriend and I were seated on a restaurant’s patio, and he ordered a beer. “Jerk,” I muttered.
He looked at me, surprised. I sometimes jokingly lament his ability (or, rather, my lack of ability) to drink hard alcohol, but never beer. Beer was just never that important to me. I’d drink it, of course — that’s how alcoholism works — but it made me feel full faster than it made me drunk, thus it wasn’t very efficient for my purposes.
Which is why I was just as surprised as he was by what came out of my mouth.
Usually, he just laughs when I give him crap about the booze he can drink that I can’t; he understands where it comes from, and that I’m not really mad. This night, however, because it was about beer, he looked at me concerned.
“You OK?”
I was. But apparently, somewhere in my subconscious, I associated a warm summer evening with the taste of a beer.
For as long as I’ve been sober, I’ve been told that nonalcoholic beer is a bad idea.
“Near beer” — a phrase that makes me nails-on-a-chalkboard cringe for reasons I don’t totally understand — is triggering to people in recovery, I was told.
The argument is that drinking something with the look and taste of actual beer will make the person want the real stuff.
That may well be true. If you’re in recovery and beer was your jam, you’d probably want to think very carefully about popping open a nonalcoholic beer.
But as someone who was so severely addicted to alcohol that some mornings I drank cough syrup or mouthwash just to get my hands to stop shaking, I don’t mess around with even small amounts of alcohol.
I’ve been sober for 11 years. It wasn’t until last year that I was willing to try kombucha, which also has trace amounts of alcohol. (Even then, I only tried it in an effort to get some good bacteria in my wonky stomach.)
I don’t think it’s inherently bad for recovering alcoholics to drink nonalcoholic beer.
It’s just never been something I’m comfortable with for myself… drumroll please… until now!
That’s because, finally, I can partake: Brands like Heineken and Budweiser have started producing alcohol-free beer. Not “a little alcoholic” beer, but genuinely 100 percent alcohol-free beer.
So if, like me, you’re zero-beer curious, I’ve put together a list of your options.
There are companies making beers that are 0.05 percent ABV; that’s such a low amount of alcohol, I’m including them on the list. You’d literally have to drink 100 of them to get the alcohol content that’s in one regular beer. However, I’m marking them with an asterisk, so if you want to stay 100 percent alcohol-free, you can.
I haven’t actually had a chance to try any of these yet, but I’m totally going to!
Here are a few alcohol-free beers:
- *Beck’s Blue (0.05 percent)
- *Bitburger Drive (0.05 percent)
- Budweiser Prohibition Brew (0 percent)
- Heineken 0.0 (0 percent)
Interestingly, there are a TON in the United Kingdom, but when I was doing research, I kept getting conflicting information about whether they’re available in the United States.
