First 0,0% ABV beer (alcohol-free)

This is the story of the first 0,0% ABV beer, commonly known as ‘alcohol-free’. This is NOT a blog about 0,5% beers, which are legally called ‘non-alcoholic’ beers. (But I can understand why it’s confusing).

To lay all the cards on the table from the start, I’m not even sure it’s possible to create a completely 0,0% beer. Most 0,0% beers on the market have a trace amount of alcohol in them – but usually less than 0,05% (as defined by government guidance). It’s an amount that wouldn’t even show up on a breathalyser test.

In fact, if you were to drink a whole pint (568ml) of a beer with 0,05% ABV, you’d be consuming about 0.028 units of pure alcohol, about the same as drinking orange juice, which also contains natural trace alcohol*.

And to put it another way (indulge me), if you were to try to get tipsy on 0,0% beer, you’d have to drink roughly 33 litres (or over 100 cans) to match the alcohol in ONE regular beer. So physiologically, it’s not really possible – you’re more likely to die from hyponatremia (having too much water in your body) and burst your bladder. Ouch.

OK, one more subject to cover before getting into the story proper. Some people might not know what ABV means. Literally, the acronym stands for Alcohol By Volume. It is the global standard for measuring the amount of alcohol (ethanol) in a drink and it’s a legal requirement to have it on the label of any alcoholic liquid.

Here's an example. A regular beer typically has between 3-6% ABV. Not to get too maths A-Level, but there’s an easy(ish) equation to work out the number of alcohol units in your drink.

Strength (ABV) x the volume of the drink (in ml) ÷ 1,000 = units in your drink. For instance, Heineken has an ABV of 5%. So, if you were drinking a standard 330ml can, it would be: 5 (ABV) x 330 (ml) ÷ 1,000 = 1.65 units. Meaning about 1.65 of that can is pure alcohol.

OK, that’s all out of the way, let’s get on.

0,0% beer is a uniquely modern phenomenon (while the story of 0,5% ABV beer is way more ancient). Because of this, there is precious and surprisingly little information about how it was created. Perhaps it’s because the beer companies have been persuaded by ruthless lawyers to keep their proprietary brewing secrets away from the public realm. It’s a shame because it makes the story – which is a triumphant combination of technology and cultural zeitgeist – a little less rich. If 0,0% had been invented in the 19^th century, they’d be volumes of information – and heroic stories of personal endeavour. But no, 0,0% was first (truly) perfected in 2017 by Heineken, so all the juiciest and nerdiest bits of information are hidden behind a company firewall and encoded server somewhere in a Dutch vault.

But Heineken didn’t invent 0,0% out of the blue. Other pioneers led the way, from the 1970s onwards, it just turns out the general drinking public weren’t really ready to accept it into the mainstream until the last 10 years of so.

As you can imagine, the most basic method of removing alcohol from beer is to heat it until the alcohol evaporates – which is a bit like distilling but letting all the alcohol escape. This works well at the dealcoholizing bit but has a profoundly negative effect on the taste – you’d essentially be cooking the beer, so many of the original subtle flavour compounds get destroyed, creating a bit of a brown, tasteless liquid (for example, myrcene, an essential oil found in hops that gives important fruit and herby flavours, boils off at about 64°C versus alcohol at about 78°C).

So how did the early 0,0% entrepreneurs stop this happening without an insipid taste tarnishing the whole new category?

The first to have a go was German brand Clausthaler in 1972. They started experimenting with a process known as ‘Controlled Fermentation’, which (as the name suggests) effectively stopped normal beer fermentation before alcohol could be developed.

I’m no chemist, but some of the key bits of this controlled brewing process are: Drastically slowing yeast activity down by brewing at a lower temperature. Mashing at a high temperature to reduce the number of fermentable sugars in the wort. Flash pasteurising at a key time in fermentation to halt yeast activity (or the opposite – lower the temperature to near-freezing to deactivate the yeast). 

Controlled Fermentation had the benefit of preserving the intended flavour profile of the beer as it’s made with the same ingredients (avoiding the need to strip flavour out at the end). The negatives were that it relied on very precise brewing equipment – get it wrong by a few minutes and alcohol would be created. Also, the final flavour always had the reputation of feeling a bit ‘thin’ (as less sugar was fermented). 

It was a hard slog for Clausthaler to achieve the right flavour. Apparently, they began developing non-alcoholic beer in 1972 but didn’t launch until 1979. The result was a 0,45% ABV beer that Clausthaler adhered to the strict traditional German purity laws.

Later in the UK in the 1980s, other big breweries started trying to make 0,0% ABV beers. The first was Barbican, often recognized as the UK's first alcohol-free lager, brewed by Bass.

Then Guinness launched Kaliber with a high-profile advertising campaign fronted by Scottish comedian Billy Connolly (who had battled with alcohol addiction previously).

Both were dealcoholised at the end of the brewing process, meaning the taste was somewhat sub-optimal.

But now it was starting to be accepted and talked about amongst the drinking public, breweries began looking for better ways to create an alcohol-free beer in earnest. This is where vacuum distillation comes in. Chemists started realising that if you heated the beer in a vacuum chamber, the boiling point of alcohol was drastically reduced – so the beer didn’t have to be boiled to within an inch of its life anymore.  

So, while alcohol evaporates at about 78.3˚ C under normal conditions, the vacuum chamber meant it only needed to get to a warmish temperature to achieve the same result – crucially allowing a lot more of the complex and delicate flavour compounds to remain intact.  

There are many benefits to this process. Greater flavour preservation, of course. But also greater quality control – the specialist equipment allows for precise adjustments to remove alcohol without sacrificing taste. There’s energy efficiency too, with the brewing taking less time and the lower temperatures meaning less energy is consumed.  

After vacuum distillation, the alcohol-free beer must be artificially carbonated. Normal beer does this naturally at the fermentation phase as yeast ‘eats’ the sugar turning it into alcohol, producing carbon dioxide on the side. These are the bubbles in the beer. But because alcohol-free beer no longer has yeast, it lacks the natural CO2. To get over this problem, most brewers inject the beer with bubbles when bottling, like a soft drink.

Today, this vacuum distillation is how most alcohol-free beers are made. The most high-profile is Heineken, in a multi-million pioneering project led by Willem van Waesberghe, the global Master Brewer, they brought Heineken 0,0% to life (and later 0,0% Draught) in 2017.

Willem seems like an interesting character. His father might have been a brewer but the Dutchman’s first passion was geology – he holds a Master of Science in Geochemistry from Utrecht State University and an MBA from the Rotterdam School of Management. He says he only started preferring beer to rocks by his mid-twenties, graduating from the Siebel World Brewing Academy in 1992 and brewing his first beer – a wheat beer – in a small Utrecht brewery aged 26.   

Today he is responsible for maintaining the quality and consistency of Heineken beer worldwide, with a special interest in 0,0%. There are many press interviews with him he but none give away too much about the process itself.

He says Heineken 0,0% uses almost the same ingredients as normal Heineken but with less malt – and admits that any flavours that are lost during evaporation are added afterwards.

“Heineken and Heineken 0.0 aren't the same taste, but the flavour and aroma profile is very close, and we try to make the brain think it is the same.”

Heineken 0,0% is still brewed using Heineken’s proprietary A-yeast, vital for creating the signature complex fruity esters – and vacuum distillation then preserves these flavours, just taking out the alcohol. Willem then does something unusual, he ‘restores’ any lost flavours afterwards, which has the added bonus of ensuring the mouthfeel is closer to the regular beer.  

“There are five fruit esters, or aroma compounds, which are very typical for Heineken, and we know which ones to bring back.”

With Heineken leading the way, a host of other breweries, big and small, have leant into creating their own 0,0% beers. The non-alcoholic segment is growing super fast within the wider beer category – it was up 9% in 2024 and is projected to have 8% annual growth until at least 2029. There are still some dramatic variations of market share across specific countries though e.g. the US and UK it sits at about 1-2% of the whole category whereas the forward-drinking Germans are buying in droves – non-alcoholic accounts for over 14% of all beer sales!

The good thing is most beer portfolios of note now include an alcohol-free version. It may have taken until the 2020s for it to become socially acceptable, but now it’s definitely got its time in the sun (and none of us will have a hangover in the morning).

*The human body is basically always producing alcohol as we go about our lives. All the food we eat has sugar in it and through digestion, some is turned into a small amount of ethanol (daily, it’s about a quarter of a 4% beer). There are also loads of foods that naturally contain or produce alcohol. A ripe banana, for instance, can be about 0.4% ABV. In fact, all ripe or overripe fruit typically have about 0.1-0.3% ABV. Soy sauce and vinegar can contain as much as 0.2%. Bread, yes bread (particularly sourdough or burger buns), have up to 1.0% in the dough – which usually bakes off. Most fruit juices have 0.1-0.5% ABV, due to natural fermentation. Kombucha is a fermented product that, when sold as a soft drink, must be under 1.15% ABV, but most will have some residual alcohol. And being fermented, kimchi can be up to 1.0%. Vanilla extract is an odd one. It contains at least 35 per cent alcohol, but as it’s mostly used in baking, the alcohol burns off.