Are you giving "Dry January" a try this year? In this week's "Laura's Good News," WCCO's Laura Oakes learns about the resurgence of non-alcoholic beer, and meets a local brewer who has found a way to actually make it taste good.
Paul Pirner quit drinking in 2016, but still wanted the social life that comes with going to bars and clubs. So he and a friend learned all they could about the brewing process, and came up with a way to make their own 100% non-alcoholic beer that actually tasted like the craft beers becoming so popular at the time.
“Our process is a little bit different but very similar to a standard proving process, and ours is just one way of doing it,” Pirner says. “There are other companies are doing it other ways to varying degrees of success. Some are just doing great jobs. This is just how we chose to use it because this is the way that we could figure out how to get the biggest kind of full body brew on the market. And then also the only 0.0 ABV microbrewery that's out there in America.”
Pirner co-founded Hairless Dog Brewing Company, which now has beer in local bars, restaurants, and liquor stores. He's also the founder of the Adult Non-Alcoholic Beverage Association.
“When we started, there weren't a whole lot of options and since then Dry January and the sober-curious movement and other things have kind of come around behind that to make it very popular and quite frankly very economically feasible for a lot of larger companies to come in,” Pirner explains. “That's creating a lot of confusion for the consumer as it does in just about any industry where people come rushing in and so the NABA was put together to kind of unify the voices of all of the newer craft N/A beer and non-alcoholic beverage producers that you've seen coming out over the last few years and really kind of stick together as an industry to make sure that quality is high, responsibility is high. If you say something on your label, you actually mean it. All of those good things. That's why we all got together and decided to start this.”
National market research shows the popularity of non-alcoholic beer has been skyrocketing as more people, particularly millennials, seek ways to reduce or even eliminate their alcohol consumption, as many are doing at least during Dry January. Last year non-alcoholic beer sales in the U-S hit $188 million.
Catch Laura's full interview with Paul Pirner on the "Laura's Good News" podcast, also heard Sunday morning at 6:30 on WCCO Radio or the Audacy app.
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