My 30-year journey in non-alcoholic beer: from Kaliber to craft brewers

I first encountered non-alcoholic beers about 30 years ago. I’d go through sporadic phases of not drinking, and found it hard to drink soft drinks all night when I was out with my friends. So I dipped my toe into the world of ersatz beers. I think the first brand I remember was Clausthaler. It was interesting because it wasn’t an offshoot of another brand; it was a genuine German non-alcoholic beer company, set up in the 1970s, which had been brewing alcohol-free beer since then.What Clausthaler did was restrict fermentation. It used slow yeast, or lazy yeast, and carefully controlled its fermentation so that it never crossed the threshold to become alcohol. More than a decade later, seeing that this nascent niche was beginning to grow, the big brewing companies began to offer their own versions.In Ireland, the main offering was Kaliber, which was brewed by Guinness. Occasionally, you could find a beer called Buckler, which came from Heineken. The method they used was different. They brewed a full-strength lager, but then removed the alcohol. The older methods relied on applying high heat, which had an impact on flavour, and brewers often compensated by adding quite a lot of sugar.And with all of these beers, there was a taste deficit – they didn’t taste quite like beer and the texture was thin. Compared with alcoholic beers, my unsophisticated palate thought they tasted a bit like metal: they lacked body and generally didn’t have the topspin impact you’d expect from a beer. They were fine, but you wouldn’t really drink them all night.READ MOREAfter I stopped drinking alcohol totally, the key development for me was the arrival into Ireland of the German beers, notably the weissbiers. These were cloudy wheat beers with a very strong taste, and unlike the earlier generation of alcohol-free beers, they didn’t use heat to de-alcoholise; rather, they used a cold vacuum process. They then added carbon dioxide to restore the carbonation, and some of them added sugar.Erdinger alcohol-free So Erdinger was the signal-bearer, and it is still available and very popular. It’s used as an isotonic drink (you see people drinking it after endurance races) and has a high percentage of sugar. It was a bit too sugary for me and the texture felt a little sharp on the throat. At the time, I was a regular at an off-licence in Stoneybatter in Dublin 7 called DrinkStore, which had a great selection of craft beers and a big alcohol-free section. At the time (this is 15 years ago) it had other weissbiers, including Schneider Weisse.Clausthaler, the first non-alcoholic beer Harry remembers drinking For me that was a winner. It had a rich taste and a full texture, and remains my favourite German weissbier. It combined sweetness with the taste of barley malt. So that was a step change, but the real game changer was to come this century with the arrival of the craft beer revolution.Some of the big breweries had perfected techniques for better removal of alcohol once the beer had been brewed, using processes that relied on low rather than high temperatures, and thus much better at retaining the taste and feel of beer. But the craft beer industry, and the craft beer brewers, did not try to replicate an alcoholic beer in non-alcoholic form. Instead, they set about creating their own distinctive line of non-alcoholic beers, with a great taste that wasn’t dependent on alcohol.With many of the IPAs, the difference was in the hops, because these offer loads of different flavours, going from bitter to sweet, from herby to sour. And, like Clausthaler, many of them created a drink using slow or lazy yeast that never became alcohol. So that’s why you see a lot of them being described as a “hoppy” beer. Brewdog's Nanny State non-alcoholic IPA At the vanguard of craft beer IPAs was BrewDog, which gave us two excellent non-alcoholic IPAs: Punk AF and the brilliantly named Nanny State. As an aside, one of the great things about drinking non-alcoholic beer is that some of the breweries have come up with fantastic names for their non-alcoholic beers. So, the combination of these new techniques, lazy yeast, and gentle, cold removal of alcohol made for a much better-quality beer that gave a really good taste, lovely body and texture, and something you could happily drink all night without feeling it was a little bit too much.The other big moment was in 2020 when Guinness 0.0 was introduced. Guinness had earlier experimented with low-alcohol versions of the famous stout, including Guinness Pure Brew, but it was the 0.0 that made the big breakthrough for the Irish brewing giant.Guinness deliberately set about making a replica of the original stout, but with the alcohol removed, and it achieved that by using modern methods, including cold filtration, which gently removed the alcohol while retaining the taste, the body and the texture.One of the problems with the very early beers was that they felt watery, with a texture more like lemonade or water than the rather denser texture of beer. And in terms of density, let’s face it, Guinness is almost a soup. So one of the most important things with Guinness 0.0 was to try to get that kind of creaminess, texture and thick body when people were experiencing it.Guinness 0.0, the non-alcoholic beer that made the big breakthrough for the Irish brewing giant And the other thing, of course, was the creamy head, which needed to be right. So, from the start, the cans of Guinness 0.0 had the widget in them that gave it that nitrogenation, and its initial draught version in bars essentially involved putting a can through a device that looked like an Italian coffee machine.That created problems. It was a bit fiddly and convoluted, and took a lot of time, so it has developed into a conventional keg for delivering draught Guinness – a huge success. Of course, it tastes a tiny bit different from the full-alcohol version, but not that much.[ Sales of non-alcoholic Guinness surged 35% last yearOpens in new window ]There are now many Irish people who go out to a pub, drink Guinness 0.0 all evening while enjoying the conviviality of a pint, and then drive their car home at the end of the night. By any yardstick, that has to be a good thing.An important distinction has to be made about how alcohol is classified. Guinness 0.0 and Heineken 0.0 have zero alcohol. But any beer with an ABV (alcohol by volume) rating of less than 0.5 per cent is generally classified as non-alcoholic or alcohol free. It’s a bit confusing. Then there are low-alcohol beers such as Donegal brewery Kinnegar’s Low Tide, which has 1 per cent ABV. So, what do I like? I really like Guinness 00. It has genuinely changed my experience of going to a pub to meet friends. I am a big fan of the Irish craft beers, mainly IPAs. I love Fierce Mild, which is brewed in Dundalk using a slow yeast. It has an IPA, and also a new lager, both of which are top notch. Fierce Mild non-alcoholic beer I like Whiplash’s Never Drinking Again, another IPA. Brewmaster from Dundalk does a really nice Zero Nitro stout. And I also like Last Man Standing from the Tom Crean Brewery, as well as Full Sail Zero from Galway Bay Brewery. Wicklow Wolf’s IPA is great too.Whiplash Never Drinking Again Wicklow Wolf non-alcoholic IPA Galway Bay Brewery's Full Sail Zero You’ll recall I more or less started my non-alcoholic journey with Clausthaler, and I hadn’t seen it for many, many years. Then I was on holiday in Italy this summer, and when I ordered a non-alcoholic beer in a restaurant, I saw that the only choice on offer was Clausthaler. It was an IPA, and it was delicious.[ Is there alcohol in alcohol-free beers, and should we be worried?Opens in new window ]And even though memory can be very deceptive, especially over the course of 30 years, I think the Clausthaler I tasted in 2026 was infinitely superior to the version I tasted back in 1996. That said, it was good to see the original of the species is still going strong, using modern brewing techniques to produce a superior taste, while staying true to its roots.