Best Non-Alcoholic Beer

I might recommend Malta Goya; technically it and most other malt sodas are unfermented beer, and because they are made with malted barley, they taste like extremely sweet porter to me.

If you want to get hubby of the year, you could abstain with her...but that would be kind of pointless from a development standpoint; as I recently learned, sperm develop over several months before they are able to fertilize. So if one wants to make the best contribution early on in the child-rearing process, he should abstain for months in advance of conception.

 

Clausthaler Amber I find is actually surprisingly decent.

 

I had St. Pauli NA once, it was ok.

 

Next trend following the gluten free bandwagon is going to be non alcoholic brewers. The market is there.

 

i suspect we see super-session beers first… 1-3%

 

Clausthaler.

 

Count me out...My favorite non-alcohol beverage is water.

 

The Erdinger Alkoholfrei is not bad. http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/703/7211/

 

The only one I've ever had is Buckler. It's not that great.

 

Clausthaler Golden Amber.

 

I decided not to drink alcohol while going thru chemo a couple of years ago and after a few months I really missed the taste of beer. I tried a lot of NA beers and thought Bitburger NA tasted the most like a real beer. I think it's .005%. I wouldn't drink more than 1-2 at a time. From experience it was quite depressing polishing off a six pack and then driving to buy another six pack.

 

This one was pretty tasty, back in the 70s and 80s when it was brewed in Philadelphia by Ortlieb and then Schmidt's, under license and using yeast from Hurlimann (creator of Samichlaus). Ex-Ortlieb/Schimdt's brewer (and creator of Brooklyn Lager), Bill Moeller, has said they used the same base beer as their version of McSorley's Ale. The beer was hopped with Brewer's Gold and was easily among the hoppiest beers brewed in the US by the oldline brewers (behind only a few surviving ales like the Ballantine ales, Rainier Ale, etc.).

If anything, if most near beers tasted like diluted, carbonate wort, Birell tasted like carbonate hop tea. A good "Beer"? No. But a tasty beverage when one wanted a non-alcoholic, non-"sweet pop" one and it was easily found in grocery stores and health/natural food stores, so one could sip one purchased at a GNC while accompanying one's SO shopping the mall .

US versions were also brewed by Matt and, later, Heileman, which, as they did with so many hoppy brands they acquired (i.e., the aforementioned Rainier and McSorley ales, Carling Red Cap Ale), ruined it. Heileman seemingly hated hops . Birell is still around elsewhere in the world, brewed under license at various breweries. There's current a Czech and Australian version, last I checked.

That era came and went in the US in the late 80s-early 90s (that's not to say that, like other beer fads, it couldn't return). Many of the old line US breweries at the time came out with non-alcoholic beers (that's when O'Doul's, Sharp and Coors Cutter all emerged), Heileman did a big push for their two near beers that had survived since Repeal (Kingsbury and Schimdt Select), etc. There was even an early "craft" non-alcoholic called Firestone NA, from the Firestone-Fletcher Brewing Co. of LA, CA - one of the co-owner being the father and father-in-law of the current Firestone-Walker founders.

That, too, happened already - again, in the period noted above when many brewers came out with an "LA" (Low Alcohol) spin-off of their flagship brand. Heileman, in particular, had numerous "LA" versions of their collection of former flagships of acquired breweries, while Anheuser Busch had a beer that was simply called "LA".


Thus the legal definition in the US that beer must have "less than 2.5% alcohol by volume" to be labeled "Low (or Reduced) Alcohol".

 

Always my favorite quote when this subject comes up:

"The man who called it 'near beer' was a bad judge of distance." --- Philander Johnson

 

make your own. but i don't think beer is considered beer without a fermentation process.

 

Most non-alcoholic cereal beverages (aka "near beers") are traditionally made by brewing and fermenting a standard beer and then removing most of the alcohol via several different processes. The Feds at the TTB consider non-alcoholic near beers "malt beverages" - the same overall designation used for all "beer" in the US.
See Chapter 4 Beverage Alcohol Manual V. 3 Malt Beverages:

 

So NA Beer is a near beer and "was" a beer. At it's current state, it's not a beer. hmm.... cereal beverage. have one for breakfast?

 

Clausthaler is also my recommendation.

NA Beer is particularly worth considering after the baby is born to promote lactation:
http://www.babymed.com/food-and-nutrition/beer-breastfeeding

 

I give Dasani a slight edge over Aquafina...

It has less notes. What kind of notes? All of them.

 

I'll second what one poster already said about Erdinger's N/A Weiss. I had a couple sips of it one time and it was pretty good. Others have recommended Clausthaler and it seems to be the general consensus that it's the best one that's widely available. I've never had it though.

 

Mine is Snapple