THE JOURNAL
You’re probably familiar with the concept of Dry January by now. Ditto Stoptober. I could mention Dry July, but I’d rather not. There are now many neat names for the concept of taking a month off alcohol and, after the traditional excess of December (I just had to put three empty Celebrations tubs and two bottles of Baileys in the recycling bin next to all the Christmas trees), January feels like a fitting time. It is a drab month where drizzle sits static in the air, where everyone’s social batteries are completely depleted and where our trousers don’t quite fit the way they used to. Not socialising in January is the easy part because nobody wants to do that. Not drinking, less so.
A few years ago, if you wanted to quench the strange itch that only a beer seems to be able to scratch, alcohol-free (AF) offerings were feeble: a small bottle of something murky that tastes like lager someone dropped a handful of pennies into. Now, we’re spoiled for choice. As well as all the big breweries getting like-for-like-ish replacements into almost every pub (Heineken 0.0, the very serviceable Guinness Alcohol Free and I suppose technically I should mention Beck’s Blue), there’s a wealth of indie options that are doing all the same interesting things modern breweries are doing (nice labels and forcing you to know what citra is), but without the headache. Here are some good ones.
01.
Beavertown Lazer Crush (0.3 per cent)
One thing you realise when you switch to AF is how tedious the actual act of drinking can be. Without the getting drunk part of it, you really are just chaining the same drink again and again, in weirdly massive proportions, for no reason at all, and nothing sharpens that feeling like spending an evening drinking bland AF lagers. Lazer Crush sidesteps that by tasting as consistently interesting as its alcoholic big brother, Neck Oil, but with enough heft to it that you don’t feel like you’re drinking air. Makes all the bathroom trips you’re suddenly very aware that you are taking worth it.
02.
Clwb Tropicana Non Alc (0.5 per cent)
I have chosen never to investigate how alcohol-free beer is made. Ever since I figured out how they decaffeinated tea, I’ve scaled back how much I want to learn about the world, but you have to assume that Tiny Rebel uses actual witchcraft to make Clwb Tropicana Non Alc. It just, very simply, tastes exactly like Clwb Tropicana (a mango-y, pineapple-y, tropical-but-not-too-tropical delight), but in a slightly different coloured can. Who knows what it does to make this happen? Potions made with toads? Arcane rituals beneath thunderstorms? Blood sacrifices?
03.
Omnipollo Nyponsoppa (0.3 per cent)
Omnipollo’s Nyponsoppa is less of a beer and more of a beer cocktail, a malty amber-coloured base with a big handful of syrupy rosehip over the top of it, a lagerita by way of an autumnal Scandinavia. That means it’s technically a bit of an acquired taste, but if you’ve already exhausted every alcohol-free option the surrounding bars and corner shops have on offer, it’s worth graduating to this. The kind of alcohol-free drink I seek out even in months when I am drinking.
04.
Mash Gang Stoop (0.5 per cent)
If years of drinking in pubs gave me pub radar (I have a finely tuned instrument inside my head that can tell just by glancing across the road at a place whether it will have a suitably cosy vibe, whether or not the landlord will like me and if it has a pool table), Lockdown 1 gave me beer radar, an intuition as to whether a beer will be interesting or not based vaguely on the bottle shape, label design and name. London-based Mash Gang is a completely AF brewery that does all the cool and interesting and boundary-pushing stuff your favourite indie breweries are doing (back-print T-shirts, heavy metal logos, semi-insane breakfast cereal pale ales), just without the alcohol content. Its lager, Stoop, rightly took gold at last year’s AF Beer Club Awards.
05.
Maisel’s Weisse Alkoholfrei (0.5 per cent)
The first beer I fell truly in love with was Hoegaarden, for some reason (in writing this sentence, I’ve just realised exactly how pretentious a student I was, which is very). So, I’ve always had a soft spot for a good Weissbier. Nothing heralds 5.00pm on a balmy summer day quite like it. Maisel’s Weisse is a great alcohol-free option for a number of reasons. It doesn’t have that weird hollow flavour some of the more ambitious alcohol-free beers have; it tastes like a genuinely good wheat beer, with hints of banana and a creamy finish; and, crucially, it comes in a 500ml bottle, which you really start to appreciate when you figure out just how many AF options come in smaller servings and just how much of your night you spend opening bottles and cans.
06.
Al’s Classic (0.5 per cent)
The same way New York pizza tastes unique because of the water used in the dough and Chicago-style is something else entirely, so American beer has its own tangible, impossible-to-emulate quality. The right American beer tastes like you’ve got a plaid shirt on over a grandad-collar undershirt and you’re conceal-carrying something that could stop a tank. Al’s Classic does exactly what all American beers make you want to do (eat a smash burger in the middle of some karaoke while taking back-pain medication), but lets you drive home along a really long, wide road afterwards.
07.
Infinite Session (0.5 per cent)
Having a few delicate and hand-selected boutique beers around the place is all well and good, but sometimes you just need to absolutely crush a lager without thinking about it. Infinite Session, based in London’s Olympic Park, has three alcohol-free offerings suited for just that – a lager that tastes like a lager, as well as an IPA and a pale ale – and sells them in the rarest of alcohol-free serving sizes, “the slab”. Pick up a mixed 24-pack from its website and it will keep you going for the whole month.