The best low-alcohol and non-alcoholic beers for Dry January 2023, tried and tested
Low-alcohol and non-alcoholic beers, which are usually low-calorie too, are catching on in a big way. Here's our pick of the best buys
When I recently gave up drinking for a month, while watching TV I found that my right hand kept reaching over to the side-table where the beer should be. The ingrained habit of taking a swig of something cold and hoppy was proving impossible to break. So I let the hand have the beer it wanted - just without the alcohol.
My hand couldn’t tell the difference and, surprisingly, my tastebuds couldn’t either. It turns out that the best alcohol-free beers (the first I tried was Guinness Zero) are now almost indistinguishable from the “real” thing, allowing me to go sober without changing my habits at all.
“The new beers are richer and fuller than they used to be, which reflects the influence of master brewers from Europe entering the market,” says Stuart Elkington, founder of specialist retailer drydrinker.com (who has produced the first ever low-alcohol beer advent calendar this year). “Low-alcohol lager is particularly difficult to do right," Stuart says. "It used to be quite sweet, but now the profile has definitely changed.”
Independent analysts Statista valued the global market at roughly £13bn in 2020. “It’s been growing about 30 percent a year in terms of volume and I don’t see that changing,” says Elkington, who set Dry Drinker up as a side-hustle in 2017 while working for a brewery. “At the time there was only one famous low-alcohol beer, which was Becks Blue, so I went around looking for others. Now I’ve got 125 beers on the site and I could probably have 300, there’s so much choice out there.”
A recent study by the Portman Group found that a quarter of British drinkers are keen to cut back on booze, rising to nearly a third of 18-24 year-olds. The big news this year is that non-alcoholic beer is fast overtaking low-alcohol varieties in popularity. The trend is clear. All the more reason to find the best of the current brews.
How I tested the best low-alcohol beers
With recommendations from specialists like Elkington, I supped my way through 60 low-alcohol brands. I was looking for an attractive colour, a complex taste and a rich, creamy, frothy head that stays with the beer all the way down the glass. Most importantly, I was looking for the “aaah” moment: the pleasure of opening a cold beer when you get home from work. Only the best low-alcohol beers can pass that test. Here they are.
Best low-alcohol beers
1. Erdinger Alkoholfrei 500ml
Best overall
- 0.5 percent ABV
- 25 calories per 100ml
All the beers recommended here are either refreshing, complex, or outstandingly tasty. The Erdinger ticks all those boxes and passes the “aaah” test better than any other.
It’s a weissbier, an increasingly popular beer-type from Bavaria. Containing wheat as well as barley malts and top-fermented using special yeasts, weissbiers have a sour tang and fruity aroma, usually compared to bananas and cloves, that wakes up the taste buds.
Erdinger Alkoholfrei is as good as any of them, despite the lower ABV. It pours with a deep, lacy froth that brings a pleasant sherbet fragrance when you sip. It’s slightly salty on the lips, with a fresh-baked bread taste that goes well with German fare like sausage and mustard but also suits a Greek salad. Impressively, it doesn’t leave the slightly cloying aftertaste that can be the case with full-strength weissbiers.
Erdinger present it as a “refreshing isotonic drink” which I’m not entirely swayed by. Though it has half the calories of fruit juice and does contain vitamins B9 and B12, which play a role in the immune system, I think it might raise some eyebrows if you cracked one open at the gym.
But it definitely works as a reward to yourself on getting home. It’s also one of the most widely available of the beers tested here, found in most big supermarkets. I’d say anyone who hasn’t tried low-alcohol beers should start here.
- 0 per cent ABV
- 21 calories per 100ml
As a huge pale ale fan I was disappointed by some of the low-alcohol ales I tried and horrified by others, but Edinburgh brewer Days gets everything right. Double-fermented using CTZ, Magnum and Herkules hops, their zero per cent pale ale is vibrant and juicy, with hints of mango and plum that make it the perfect thirst-quencher when you get home from work. As it lingers on the tongue gingerbread, caramel and malted milk depths come through, making it a great accompaniment to barbecues, burgers and - in my expert opinion - Wensleydale cheese. Days Brewing also make an excellent lager, and donate two per cent of sales to progressive mental health charities. Here's hoping they branch out into other beer types soon.
- 0.5 percent ABV
- 16 calories per 100ml
Another slightly cloudy Bavarian beer, this time due to being unfiltered: the ingredients are just water, barley, yeast and hops. It has a golden body, a good foamy head and a slight salty sweetness — a little bit floral, a little bit citrus — that goes well with a crepe suzette, a key lime pie or just simple salty fries. Really good, and widely available.
- 0 percent ABV
- 8 calories per 100ml
Cloudy, highly hopped and less bitter, hazy pale ales are one of the most refreshing beer styles and Shorebreak, from Cornwall's Firebrand brewery, is an excellent example. The American Simcoe, Citra and Cascade hops give it a juicy, mango sweetness that would go equally well with a Thai curry or a fruit sorbet. Low on foamy sparkle, this is almost more of a juice than a beer. It wants to be drunk ice cold, but is all the nicer for it.
- 0% alcohol
- 50 calories per 100ml
Sweetened with lactose, this stout from Norway is as refreshing as a cola if served ice cold, so it definitely passes the ‘aah’ test. It didn’t have the creamy head I was expecting, but its delicious chocolate notes go equally well with sweets like tiramisu and rich savouries like bangers and mash. Stuart Elkington even recommends it with curries: “The dry spice of a curry really works with that bit of sweetness you get with a stout, he says. “The darker the stout, the spicier the curry.”
- 2.5 percent ABV
- 29 calories per 100ml
At 2.5 percent this is not strictly a low-alcohol beer but what’s now called ‘low-ABV’ or ‘session ale’ and in the old days was simply called ‘small beer’, hence the name. It’s tart and juicy, with a lovely tingle on the tongue and a pleasantly bitter aftertaste that cuts nicely through a charred steak, a barbecued sausage or chargrilled veg. It’s obviously still alcoholic — two of these would equal one normal-strength lager — but it’s relatively low in calories and makes a good choice for anyone aiming to cut down, rather than cut out the booze.
- 0 per cent ABV
- 21 calories per 100ml
A lot of the big-name lagers now come in zero alcohol versions. I tried over a dozen and they all taste less bitter and more refreshing than their full-alcohol brothers. Estrella Galicia is something special, though. It’s zingy and sparkly on the tongue, slightly salty, slightly sweet from the malt and with a cooling, apple-y freshness that cuts through a chilli or anything spicy and fatty. In what’s now a crowded field, this stood out.
- 0.5 percent ABV
- 32 calories per 100ml
If you’d given me this dark amber unfiltered IPA from Hamburg in a blind test I would swear it was about six percent alcohol. Dry-hopped with Simcoe and Mosaic, the secret ingredient is apparently a rare yeast that only likes certain sugars and runs out of food before it has produced 0.4 percent ABV, but stays alive to deepen the flavour. I tasted sage, thyme, plum and nectarine notes that would go well with a black forest gateau - but I enjoyed it best with a chicken jalfrezi.
- 0.4 percent ABV
- 18 calories per 100ml
The Sussex Best Bitter, made with Maris Otter and Crystal malts and four different local hops, is this Lewes brewery’s flagship beer and has won multiple awards. Filtered to reduce the ABV from 4 percent to 0.5 percent, it retains the light caramel colour and biscuity bitterness, but tastes fresher and lighter. It goes well with chicken or white fish fried in butter.
- 0.5% ABV
- 7 cals per 100ml (lager) 4 cals per 100ml (IPA)
If you're after an aid to weight-loss as well as sobriety, Stevenage brewers UNLTD have the magic formula. Their ultra-light, bright lager excels as a thirst-quencher and even as a post-gym rehydrator: not only is it the lowest-calorie lager I tested, it's also vegan, isotonic and functionally gluten-free. The IPA is more complex, more bitter, and is by quite a margin the lowest-calorie beer out there. You get three of each in this mixed case. They're also sold separately.
Also recommended
The following beers also impressed, if not quite as much as our top ten
Beavertown Astro-nought AF 330ml
Nice lemon-sorbet brightness if drunk ice cold, cuts well through salt/umami food: 0% ABV, 22cals per 100ml
Free Damm 330ml
Juicy, sweet-and-sour dark amber lager: 0% ABV, 20 cals per 100ml
Brooklyn Special Effects lager 330ml
Rich, malty, amber-style lager, tastes like a bitter: 0.4 % ABV, 29 cals per 100ml
M&S Low-Alcohol Czech Lager 500ml
Honeyed, sharp, refreshing, great with katsu curry: 0.5% ABV, 19 cals per 100ml
Big Drop Paradiso Citra IPA Alcohol Free 330ml
Light, golden, lemony IPA that has won awards: 0.5% ABV, 18 cals per 100ml
Brewdog Lost AF 330ml
Crisp, refreshing pilsner, good food accompaniment: 0.5% ABV, 10 cals per 100ml
Corona Cero 330ml
Refreshing, light, zingy, exactly like Corona, 0% ABV, 17 cals per 100ml
Smashed Lager 330ml
Classic lager with light hoppy bitterness, 0% ABV, 23 cals per 100ml.
An equally hoppy, bitter and alcohol-free Smashed Pale Ale is also available, with 16 cals per 100ml.
San Miguel 0.0 330ml
Tastes like the real thing, goes well with salty food, 0% ABV, 24 cals per 100ml
FAQ
How is low alcohol beer made?
There are two ways. One is to remove alcohol from an existing beer by vapourising or filtering it. The other is to brew as normal, but prevent the alcohol content exceeding a certain limit.
“It’s called gravity brewing: you brew up to a certain ABV, which obviously keeps the flavour of that particular beer,” says Stuart Elkington of The Dry Drinker. “The majority of the brewers in the UK use that formula.”
Is low-alcohol beer better for you?
Yes, if it helps you to stay within the UK chief medical officer’s low-risk limit of 14 units per week. Beer sold as low-alcohol must have less than 1.2 percent ABV. To be sold as alcohol-free it must have less than 0.05 percent ABV. This compares to around five per cent ABV in the average lager.
Low-alcohol beer has fewer calories, too. “The average calories in an alcohol-free beer is 80 or 90 compared to 200 or 300 in a standard beer,” Elkington says. “That’s because most are lower in sugar. There are even sugar-free beers, like Moritz. There are specialists in that market now.”
Low-alcohol beer will also contain the B-vitamins, flavonoids, polyphenols and minerals like potassium and selenium that are naturally present in beer and may have healthful effects.
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