Rehydrate

Look, I'm absolutely not against the concept of non-alcoholic beers. It's just that most of the specific ones I've drank have been so wide of the mark that I can't imagine an occasion when I would chose one over drinking nothing. There have been a handful of exceptions, virtually none of which have been in the lager, pale ale or wheat beer styles, which is unfortunately what the breweries keep turning out.

And yet I persist. Today's beers are three from reputable Irish producers which are commonly available. So much so that leaving them off Ireland's top-rated beer review blog would have been remiss. And so I hold my nose, figuratively speaking, and make a start.

Fierce Mild is a standalone non-alcoholic brewer, based in Dundalk. This Extra Pale Ale is the flagship, though a lager was added to the range recently. Let's see how we get on with this first. It immediately does itself no favours with the appearance: both murky and watery looking, with a crackly low-effort head, like your worst witbier nightmare. The aroma is metallic -- aspirin -- which is a common flaw is this kind of beer, but everyone else doing it is no excuse. The effect is ameliorated a little with some freshly lemony hops. Further marks come off for the texture, which is thin and watery, but at least it's refreshing, aided by a busy fizz which I found cleansing rather than intrusive. Not that there's much to cleanse, however. Neither aspirin nor lemons show up in the foretaste, though the latter arrives in the finish and becomes the beer's main character. That would almost have made it palatable, were it not for the creeping aspirin behind it. Ugh. This nearly becomes almost worthwhile, but misses it at the very end, leaving an unpleasant and unwelcome metal deposit on the palate that's tragically typical. I thought maybe the non-alcoholic specialists might have got the formula right, but they turn out to be no better than everyone else. Better get on with everyone else, so.

Galway Bay's flagship IPA has been around almost since the brewery's beginnings, and extensively reformulated over the years. I don't know if the recipe for Full Sail Zero is intended to resemble the current form. The visuals are a little better than the above: it's a marginally warmer shade of golden, though still murky and with no head after the first few seconds. It smells unpleasantly vegetal, like overboiled cabbage or spinach, which I guess is a small step sideways from metallic. It's not watery, and has a surprisingly decent body, but I honestly couldn't tell whether the flavour was either very slight or completely non-existent, and what I could taste was the residual effect of the previous beer. There's maybe a very faint echo of grapefruitish American hops, which would scan for it being a version of Full Sail, but it's extremely bland. It may feel like a beer, and even looks like one, and I guess it gets points for lacking off flavours. Lacking any flavour is a poor show, however, and this does little to raise my opinion of non-alcoholic beer.

The session rounds off with No Dose, purporting to be a pilsner, from Whiplash, where they know how pilsner is supposed to taste. They say it's unfiltered but it's still fairly clear; dark golden and without any head to speak of, alas. It smells mostly of lemonade, suggesting American hops rather than noble ones, though there's a telltale metallic twang too, which doesn't bode well. That lack of head is a result of low carbonation -- I hope they weren't depending on the weak fermentation process to condition it -- although there's a decent weight to it, with no wateriness. The unsubtle lemon is the main feature of the flavour, and it's a flavour which is not beer adjacent. It's barely lemon-adjacent, actually, tasting more like a very plain white lemonade. That lasts long and turns slightly sticky. We're back in the territory of un-beer-like, but not actually unpleasant to drink, as long as the sweetness doesn't upset you. It's a very poor impression of pilsner however.

I feel I've done something worthy by drinking these. There were no surprises: nothing that made me think that the paler form of non-alcoholic beer works as a beer substitute. That none of them was undrinkably disgusting should perhaps be a cause for celebration. Maybe that's what people mean when they say non-alcoholic beer has got better. It's a pretty low bar, though. I'll give science some time to catch up further before I tackle any more sets of these.