So Yeah, Dood…

In our last Near Beer episode, we told you why you might want to consider drinking near beer — you’re pregnant, you’re in recovery, your religion prohibits drunkenness — but we didn’t tell you which ones were worth bothering with. Well dear readers, my good friend and boss — soon to be mother, and thus an actual test case, Amy Creason, and I  braved the land of non-alcoholic beer on a recent Duckpin Bowling excursion to bring you recommendations on which NA beers are the good ones. I promised Amy that I wouldn’t stray from the task at hand and didn’t drink a single drop of real beer —my bowling game suffered commensurately.

From a sampling of four different brews we can tell you a number of things in general about NA beer that we couldn’t in our last post.

NA beer seems to have a much more noticeable residual sweetness than regular beers of the same basic style. What this is a result of, we’re not sure. One could speculate that maybe it’s in there as a means of covering up off flavors.

It’s also just as filling, and the hop content acts as just as much of a diuretic as regular beer. That sweetness would also seem to indicate that there’s not much of a calorie reduction either.

Finally, we noted that it’s not really much cheaper than most mid-level beers. We spent on average $6.99 per six pack.

Our samples included Becks Nonalcoholic, Kaliber, Bitburger Drive, and Buckler Nonalcoholic. (more…)