![]() ![]() We're growing at about 90 percent year over year to date. The nonalcoholic beer category itself is growing 30 percent year over year. JOHN WALKER, Co-Founder, Athletic Brewing Company: In 2018, we had brewed 800 barrels of beer, and last year we produced over 170,000 barrels of beer. One brewer of it, Athletic in Milford, Connecticut, growing like crazy. PAUL SOLMAN: No surprise that the main adult nonalcoholic beverage again, 0.5 percent of alcohol or less, is beer. KALEIGH THERIAULT, NIQ: What we see in our data is that four and five consumers of nonalcohol beer, wine and spirits are also purchasing alcohol-containing beer, wine and spirits. PAUL SOLMAN: Indeed, it's not just the one in four Americans who don't drink at all, says analyst Kaleigh Theriault. There are even bars like Hekate in Manhattan's East Village which displays, says "New Yorker" writer John Seabrook: JOHN SEABROOK, "The New Yorker": All these bottles of liquor that look like rum and whiskey and tequila, and they're all nonalcoholic. Sales of so-called nonalcoholic spirits, beer and wine at grocery, convenience, liquor stores and the like are up more than 40 percent in just the last two years. PAUL SOLMAN: But more and more of us and particularly younger people are opting to cut back on booze. KEVIN NESBITT, New Haven Resident: Never thought about ordering a non nonalcoholic martini, to be honest. ![]() PAUL SOLMAN: Of course, old-timers, like Kevin Nesbitt, who asked if the bar in which he drank martinis 30-some years ago was open at 10:00 a.m. KHALID WILLIAMS: Any bar now worth their salt is giving attention, menu real estate, and I'd say honor to cocktails that do not have alcoholic content. PAUL SOLMAN: Any drink like these spirits Williams uses can be labeled nonalcoholic if they have no more than half-a-percent of alcohol.Īnd these so-called sober cocktails, he says, are all the rage. ![]() KHALID WILLIAMS: My goal is to give you a drink that has, like a wine, a beginning, a kind of mid-palate and a finish. These are all concoctions of award winning bartender, restaurant consultant and writer Khalid Williams, cocktails with barely a trace of alcohol. KHALID WILLIAMS: I base it off of this honeybush and banana tea. KHALID WILLIAMS: Usually gin, lime juice and ginger beer. KHALID WILLIAMS, Founder and President, The Barrel Age: With grapefruit and maraschino liqueur. PAUL SOLMAN: In New Haven, Connecticut, paying homage to the Hemingway daiquiri. We sent Paul Solman out for a taste test. ![]() While nonalcoholic beer, wine and cocktails make up a small fraction of the overall alcohol market, sales are rapidly rising. beer sales traditionally peak in the summer months between Memorial Day and Labor Day, but what's in those beers is changing. “I believe there is a real space in the beverage world for this product,” Nelson said. Nelson said Rescue Club - named for a golf club but with a maritime logo suggesting a rescue boat - is also good for boaters who don’t want to drink alcohol while heading out on the lake with friends. It includes older beer drinkers moving away from consuming alcohol. It includes people avoiding alcohol for health reasons. That audience, he said, includes millennials who didn’t necessarily grow up experimenting with alcohol in the same way previous generations did but want a beverage to consume when out with alcohol-drinking friends. He knew there was an audience for Rescue Club. “Alcohol is very powerful, as we know,” Nelson said. When the pandemic shut down that lifestyle of traveling the state showing off - and often consuming - the products he was touting, Nelson said he had time to reflect on his own personal drinking habits, making Zero Gravity’s planned non-alcoholic beer hit closer to home for him. Nelson has been in the alcoholic-beverage world for years, starting at Vermont Wine Merchants before co-founding Citizen Cider as the hard-cider revival started booming nationally. I love being there at the forefront to get the message out and connecting with people on fun new things.” “I was looking for something new and different,” Nelson said. Nelson, co-founder of Citizen Cider - the hard-cider company on Pine Street nearing its 10th anniversary - joined Zero Gravity to help launch the brew. Zero Gravity had been talking for a while about making a non-alcoholic beer. ![]()
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