Bavaria brand non-alcoholic beer, pomegranate flavor. If you can find it, it's delicious. The regular flavor tastes more like beer but also tastes great.
I am surprised that nobody mentioned non-alcoholic wheat beers. They really taste better than other kinds of non-alcoholic beers. Bavaria for instance is really tasty.
I was really surprised that non alcoholic beer seems to be so special in the US (especially when trying to find a good tasting one).
In germany, while alcoholic beer is the norm on parties, when drinking to a meal or at hot summer days non- or low-alcoholic beer is served frequently in various forms.
Personally, I am a fan of wheat beer, which comes in normal (5.5%), light (3.3%) and alcohol free (0.0%). All variations have their unique but good taste. Also, beer-mix variations are popular on summer days: Wheat beer with cola, wheat beer with sprite or normal beer with sprite.
All these variations are served in exactly the same glasses and bottles as regular beer. So if you don't want to drink you can easily do so. We even have a soft drink variations served in typical beer bottles, which is also good to fit into the social norm while not drinking. Overall, you can choose taste (sweet softdrink to bitter beer) and alcohol amount quite freely.
I live in Germany where beer is abundant and so are the non-alcoholic variants. My favorite is non-alcoholic Hefeweizen - unfiltered wheat beer: no spoiled taste, the only thing absent is alcohol.
I've been sampling non-alcoholic beers recently. A few of the brands taste pretty good. I like Athletic Brewing, and the Heineken is good for what it is.
Yes, this! The non-alcoholic beers have gotten so much better over the last couple of years. I remember that they smelled quite pungent, but this is no longer the case.
I mostly enjoy IPA non-alcoholics, or a Weizen. But for regular NA pilsener I would recommend Grolsch, it's a bit more hoppy then Heineken.
I was in an East Asian style grocery once and picked up some Tsingtao 0.0 and it’s the closest tasting nonalcoholic beer I have found to the regular version
There are a few styles of hop Seltzer or hop juice that are supposed to taste like a beer, but with zero alcohol. They are available at Whole Foods - I don't remember the brand name, though.
As much as I like Czech beer (especially from 'tanks' - 400-1000 liter barrels that use gravity to get beer out and not CO2 like smaller kegs, which translates into much smoother and less sour taste), bavarian, namely Munich's Augustiner Edelstoff is by far the best lager from bottle I ever tasted.
It easily beats any 'craft' beers I've experienced around the globe, and 0.5 lter bottle costs 1.2 euro in Munich's supermarkets. Makes me think its good for my health I don't live there, would probably become significant consumer. Also, still pending with tasting it from the barrels (which should be wooden in this case, unlike basically any other mass produced beers I am aware of). They also make stronger special for Oktoberfest, another todo
Interesting. My wife and I have been almost exclusively drinking non-alcoholic beers in the past few years, as we discovered they taste almost exactly the same as regular beers of the same brands.
But then again, we're not beer tasters or into craft stuff, so maybe we can't tell.
My main gripe with the 5.0 bear is not the lack of brand but more the fact that the beer is pretty bad (also living in Bavaria).
Not sure the brand-less concept would work out for beer, since there are clear personal preferences that make no-brand beer difficult. There's less taste preferences in other products, that's why store-brand butter etc. is popular.
The non-alcoholic Erdinger Weissbier is probably the best non-alcoholic beer I've tasted.
You need to get "into" it a little before you realize it actually does taste like beer, except without the alcohol, and how much part of the flavour alcohol actually is (even with the relatively low 5% ABV that most beers are).
Also, and this may differ per regulations where you are, but many "non-alcoholic" beers do in fact contain up to 0.5% alcohol (including the Erdinger Weizener). So you'd have to drink 10 of them to feel the buzz of one normal beer, but I'd expect by that time you'd be feeling something else, over the buzz from a single beer :-P
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