Guide
Why does non-alcoholic beer often taste closer than non-alcoholic wine?
Bitterness, roast, and carbonation survive the loss of alcohol. Wine was using ethanol for aroma and body. This cellar's scores follow that, and they are not a law.
People come back from a non-alcoholic beer and a non-alcoholic 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 non-alcoholic wine so sweet? Why body is hard without alcohol.
The cellar, not a universal ranking
| Wine | Beer | |
|---|---|---|
| Firsthand bottles | 113 | 35 |
| Median score | 80 | 83 |
| Scored 85 or above | 16 | 10 |
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 non-alcoholic beer. The buying guides are Best beer and Best wine.