A Starter Guide to NA Bevvies

For the committed or curious, beer, wine, and my husband’s best mocktails

It was February of 2018 and while Olympians were chasing gold medals in PyeongChang, in Hong Kong, my husband and I were enjoying our own athletic pursuits. Winter was the best time of year for trail running and, pre-children, it was not unusual for us to head out with friends for a three-hour trail run, ending with our toes in the sand and ice-cold IPA’s in hand. We may not have had snow, but watching athletes tear down slopes and loop ice rinks, made us want run harder, faster, longer too… but we weren’t professionals, so we still wanted our beer at the end. That’s when we read an article in the New York Times that truly surprised us. Turns out many of those Olympians (the Germans at least) were drinking beer the whole time they were competing, it's just that much of that beer was alcohol-free.

A German study found that for runners who consumed non-alcoholic beer in the weeks leading up to the Munich Marathon and the two weeks after, those who drank the NA beer experienced significantly less inflammation and fewer respiratory illnesses than those given a placebo. The doctor who conducted the study, Johannes Scherr, speculates the reduced inflammation comes from the high concentration of polyphenols in the plants used to brew beer. Which is why NA beer is the true sports drink of many German athletes.

Still, John and I were skeptical. Could NA beer possibly taste good? The only non-alcoholic beer either of us could remember was O’Douls, which no one would ever mistake for quality.

It turns out, that winter where our curiosity was piqued was just the beginning of what has been an explosion of NA options in every category from beer to cocktails to alcohol-removed wine. A Swiss friend, a fellow trail runner and beer lover, pointed us toward Free Damm, from the same company that makes Estrella. She drank it all through her first pregnancy. We were shocked to find that it was just as refreshing as a lager, without the weighty brain fog that can come from the higher proof IPA’s that were proliferating in the early part of the decade.

By the time I was pregnant a year later, a whole section in the cold case at the local specialty market had been set aside for non-alcoholic beers.

Around the same time, Seedlip, a brewed NA spirit had hit the market and become a favorite of bartenders, allowing them to make mocktails and low-proof cocktails from real, brewed botanicals, a far cry from syrupy juice bombs that used to qualify as an NA option.

We got so used to this variety, it was strange to move back to the US and find for once, our country lagging behind on a beverage trend. There were one or two options, like the excellent Athletic Brewing, but not nearly the depth we had gotten used to.

But how a few years changes the landscape. Beverage industry market researcher IWSR, estimates that NA beverages will continue to expand in the US, beer leading the categories with 7% annual growth through 2027. Gen Z’s and Millennials are largely leading this charge, taking periodic breaks from drinking for social challenges like Dry January, or athletic training.

These days, local supermarkets in California stock several NA beers, specialty markets carry NA ready-to-drink cocktails, and even the local breweries always have an NA beer on tap.

Here is where I remind you that I still drink alcohol. Mostly wine, occasionally cocktails or beers, it’s just that sometimes those drinks don’t have booze. I’m no Gen Z but I think one notion they are on to is that paying closer attention to what goes in our bodies is never a bad thing. I love wine, the real stuff, for all the history and story and taste that comes from every bottle. But sometimes, like after a long run or hard work out, I just want to relax and have something cold to drink, that tastes like beer. It is beer. It’s also, sometimes a sports drink. And sometimes, it is just something cold to drink on a hot day.

Read on for a paid subscriber guide to my picks for NA beers, NA wines plus a mocktail recipe and low-proof cocktail recipe, courtesy of my in-house NA mixologist husband.