It Has Water In It
Farscy has warned about the dangers of non-alcoholic beer, but after mowing the lawn I figured I’d have one and share what I thought.
The beer is Athletic “Run Wild” IPA. According to their website it has 0.5% alcohol and a 12 ounce can has 65 calories, while for the sake of comparison a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is 5.6% alcohol and 12 ounces has 175 calories.
But the real question is how does it taste? The answer is: not bad. You can definitely tell that it’s non-alcoholic. There isn’t a lot of body to it, and you notice there isn’t a lot of malt.
At this point I’m sort of at a loss for words, because I’m terrible at detecting tastes and writing them up. It definitely has a decent amount of hoppiness, all things considered, but it’s not super well-defined like a lot of IPAs are. You’re not tasting distinct grapefruit or tropical fruit like you do with more interesting IPAs. But you can get a sense of real flavor here, at least. It seems like it’s well-balanced with the little bit of malt there is, so you’re not feeling like they just dumped a ton of hops in to compensate.
You can get a sense of the color in this photo, with a tomato for comparison, and you can see that there isn’t much foam.
One positive is that there aren’t any serious off flavors — nothing skunky or cloying, and it doesn’t taste like something has been tampered with. I don’t think if you drink a few that something would start sticking in your craw. As a beer, I’d say it tastes better than some cheap regular ones.
It costs about $12 including tax at my local store, so $2 a can, or about twice what I pay for a can of generic store brand seltzer. To be honest, I think I’ll stick with seltzer as a basic non-alcoholic drink, but this isn’t a bad way to mix things up. If you’re having a cookout and want something different to throw in the cooler for people who aren’t drinking, you could do a lot worse.
why?
why would you choose to drink a beerless beer?
when water coffee and soda are available to you?
what is your major malfunction?
I like bitter stuff (insert joke here) and I never remember to brew extra coffee and stick it in the fridge.
And there’s enough times that I need to drive somewhere that regular beer is a bad idea, or I figure I don’t need the extra calories.
It’s kind of a symptom of how the US is too dependent on cars and doesn’t have enough mass transit and walking opportunities, so you can have a couple of beers and then go out an buy some sweat socks without worrying about a crash.
i mean…if you like the flavour fair play to ya i guess
wait… stick coffee in the fridge?
does not compute
Ice coffee is a thing here but if you buy it premade from the store they almost always stick sugar and cream in it, or it’s just bad plain.
yeah…no mate
beer has alcohol
coffee is hot
everything else is wrong
Oh hard disagree! Cold brew coffee is delightful. It’s butter and strong and you get flavor depths that get overlooked when brewed hot.
oh you are so fired!
lucky you dont work for me i guess
coffee is not meant to be to cold
but i guess ill let you off this time….you’re american and dont know any better
I’m with Farscy on this one. I had a few sips of this non-beer & it was tolerable but pointless. I guess I might try this just to get a feel for the hops without any malt?
https://sierranevada.com/brews/hop-splash/
I think a decent (not super sweet) kombucha would be preferable to a non-alcoholic beer.
🤮 kombucha
Yes to cold coffee. Affogato, cold brew, coffee ice cream, etc
Meh to alcoholess beer
But don’t come at me. I’m not dying on this hill.