Guide
Dealcoholized beer versus beer brewed to 0.5%
Some NA beers are full-strength brews with the alcohol filtered out. Others never get there. Both can be excellent. They are not the same process.
The NA beer boom hid a fork in the brewery.
One path: brew the beer you already know, then remove the alcohol — cold filtration, membranes, vacuum. Guinness 0.0 is the public case. The roast, the widget, and the stout recipe come first; the filter comes last.
The other path: change the mash, the yeast, or the fermentation so the beer never climbs past 0.5%. Athletic Brewing talks about a proprietary process and is openly skeptical of taking beer all the way to 0.0. That is not automatically worse. It is not dealcoholization until they say it is, with a method attached.
What to look for
- A named removal step. Cold filtration, vacuum, reverse osmosis. Words you can search.
- A base beer. “We brew Guinness, then…” is a different sentence from “we pioneered a method.”
- Ingredients after the fact. Fructose, flavorings, and lactose are common patches. They do not disqualify a beer. They should be on the page.
How we score them
A dealcoholized stout that still drinks like stout can outrank a technically interesting low-fermentation IPA that tastes like hop tea. The reverse is also true. The badge and the score answer different questions. Keep them separate.