Beerista: The strange world of alcohol-free beers

Fancy an isotonic, vitamin-rich thirst-quencher? Erdinger’s alcohol-free beer seems to be marketed as some kind of nourishing sports drink, packed with B12 vitamins and folic acid according to the label – which also recommends a bottle a day to contribute to “healthy nutrition”.

As for the taste? Well, there isn’t much of one. It’s a bit puny on flavour with a light body and the slightest hint of lemon – though it gets top marks for looks with a good frothy head and a golden clarity.

Erdinger AlkoholFrei is one of a handful of non-alcohol beers – or more technically, less than 0.5 per cent which is the legal requirement. There are two methods generally used in brewing low/non-alcohol beers: one is to go through the normal brewing process and boil off the alcohol at the end (which also removes much of the hop flavour and aroma); or by reverse osmosis which is expensive and more technically challenging.

Next up is Paulaner’s Hefe Weissbier which has the characteristics of a traditional yeast weissbier. It’s cloudy with a banana and clove aroma and flavour, though this fades almost immediately becoming sweet and cloying. Like the Erdinger, any taste drops off into a kind of watery nothingness.

Nanny State by the Scottish Brewdog starts out well with a dark, amber clarity and a toasted malt and hoppy aroma. The more you drink, however, it starts to taste a little like cold tea, leaving a kind of unpleasant bitter and dry mouthfeel.

Baltika premium beer is brewed in Russia and a has a grainy, lager aroma and is a clear straw-golden colour. It tastes like sweet, beer-flavoured fizzy water. I’m not sure why you would choose this one – or any of them, to be honest – over a cup of tea but let’s say by the end of an alcohol-free January you’d completely forgotten what beer tasted like, this just might, very fleetingly, remind you.

@ITbeerista, beerista@irishtimes.com