Why does nonalcoholic beer often taste closer than nonalcoholic wine?

People come back from a nonalcoholic beer and a nonalcoholic wine with different complaints. The beer was thin, or watery, or a little sweet. The wine often was not wine. That is not a moral difference between the categories. It is what each drink was using alcohol to do.

Beer has other tools

Hop bitterness, roast, and carbonation do not leave with the ethanol. A stout can still taste like a stout when the alcohol is gone. An IPA can still be bitter. Those are not small leftovers. They are a lot of what the alcoholic beer was.

Wine’s parallel tools are thinner. Aroma, the feel of body, and the way sweetness sits in the mouth were all leaning on ethanol. Take it out and sugar steps forward, fruit can taste cooked, and the mid-palate can go hollow. Why is nonalcoholic wine so sweet? Why body is hard without alcohol.

The cellar, not a universal ranking

Cellar evidence — firsthand scores only
	Wine	Beer
Firsthand bottles	250	87
Median score	82	83
Scored 85 or above	54	20

Medians are public firsthand scores in this cellar. Research-only profiles are excluded. Beer has the higher median here. That gap is not a ranking of every beer over every wine.

A higher beer median in this set does not mean every beer outranks every wine. Guinness 0.0 is a dealcoholized stout that still tastes like Guinness. Oddbird GSM is a dealcoholized red that still tastes like a southern French blend. Both are high scores. They got there by different routes.

Beer also has a second history that wine rarely does. A lot of the beer cellar is naturally low alcohol: fermented to this strength, with no removal step. That is a different object from a full-strength beer that was stripped. How to buy nonalcoholic beer. The buying guides are Best beer and Best wine.

In the cellar

Compare holds up to four. Want to try keeps a bottle in My Bottles.