A welcome disruption

Non-alcoholic beer gets the occasional bit of coverage on here, though I tend to find very few which perform the role required of a beer. Pale ales, wheat beers and lagers seem to be the preferred styles, which may be the problem. I've often said that dark styles make for better alcohol-free beer, my favourite to date being Švyturys Go Juodas, and the Guinness one is pretty decent too. The latter's success has provided an opportunity for other breweries to get in on the 0.0 stout racket, and the first I've seen locally is Dundalk Bay's Zero Zero Nitro Stout, available in Aldi.

It's in a widget can and pours well, the head forming and staying in place as it should. Nitro here doesn't mean an absence of aroma, and there's quite a pungent roastiness: thick coffee, made a little Turkish with cardamom and nutmeg. Guinness adds fructose sugar to its 0.0 on the grounds that there isn't enough flavour in the base grains. Maybe that's a quirk of the Guinness recipe, because this is all-malt (barley and wheat) and there's no lack of flavour. It's very bitter, mixing dark toast with savoury herbs, the intensity turning almost metallic by the end. A little chocolate or mocha sweetness creeps in as it warms and helps soften the experience. The texture is where it falls down most, however: although there's a certain creamy aspect because of the nitrogen smoothness, it's inescapably thin, with a disappointing watery quality in the finish. Maybe this is where bulking-up with a non-fermentable sugar might have helped.

Overall, though, it's impressive stuff. Dundalk Bay does good stouts in general, and they seem to have brought some of that acumen to this one. It's boldly flavoured and tastes like a big and bitter old-fashioned stout. My theory holds up. Now, who else wants to give this style a go?

January already?

For some time now I've been of the opinion that stout is the ideal style for alcohol-free beer. For a start there's all those lovely non-beer dark malt drinks, plus the excellent Švyturys GO Juodas, and then the couple of experiments from the Guinness Open Gate Brewery which turned out well. Diageo has now gone all-in with a full-production Guinness 0.0. It differs from the experimental ones, and their Pure Brew NA lager, by starting out as normal Guinness from the bright tank and is then de-alcoholised and re-flavoured with fructose and other non-specified additives. They sent me a couple of cans to try out.

As expected, it's fairly convincing. The texture is spot on, so it certainly feels like drinking a Guinness, and there's the tangy sour bite at the top which is the Guinness signature move. The seams are more visible when you look closer: that sweet and worty effect which plagues non-alcoholic beers is present, but neatly muted by bitterness and roast. There's also a lingering metallic edge which I don't think you get in clean-to-the-point-of-bland Guinness. So it's not flawless, but simply by being a stout it's streets ahead of the other dealcoholised options out there.

This is very much an idea whose time has come and I can see it doing well.

Edit on 11/11/2020: Diageo have just announced a total product recall due to microbiological contamination. I haven't suffered any ill effects but you can't be too careful.

Around Europe on the dry

As I mentioned yesterday, Carlsberg hosted the EBCU for one day of their most recent meeting. The Carlsberg Conference Centre is richly appointed, and just beside the coffee machine there was a fridge offering a plethora of non-alcoholic beers from the company's European portfolio. Well, it would be rude not to.

Birell Belgian Wit, from Poland, is delightfully peachy, sweet and a little sticky, with overtones of lemon. There's that worty quality I associate with non-alcoholic beers generally, though the fruit content is high enough that it gets away with it. Not sure I can imagine drinking lots of it, however.

There's also a Birell Lager, which honestly tasted more like a wit than the wit. Or maybe a radler. Either way, lemon features big. It doesn't have much else to say, just a mild metallic tang in the finish. The texture is thick and un-lager-like, though that does give it a gorgeous stiff head of foam on top. While not unpleasant it's just too sweet. Pretty typical of this style.

Carlsberg's own Nordic Hvede is a wheat beer. This is lighter textured but no more beer-like. The aroma is all rich baked apple while the flavour is mixed fruit bubblegum. After the initial candy punch it finishes dry and quite watery. Most of the others I'd nod through but this is actively unpleasant.

My fellow tasters made faces when it came to the Greek offer, Fix 'Aneu. It's a pale yellow colour. It smells horribly funky; agricultural, like slurry or silage. The flavour isn't as bad, but still terrible. Over-boiled vegetables is the main thing, and a sharp metal tang, leading to carbolic soap. It is, in short, absolutely disgusting.

San Miguel 0,0 at least looks better: quite a rich golden colour. Sweet and worty candyfloss is the aroma, and it's sweet to taste, finishing with a bitter tinny tang. The worst of both worlds, really.

Switzerland brings us Feldscholossen Alkoholfrei Blanche/Weizenfrisch. It's fairly inoffensive. The worst of it is a soapy tang, but that sits atop a bright and juicy pineapple and stonefruit element. The texture is nicely fluffy. I still wouldn't count it as good though: it never manages to shake the feeling of laundry detergent.

Naturally there's a Feldschlossen Alkoholfrei Lager. It starts with a sharp and sickly aroma, leading to a medium-sweet flavour carrying a sense of toffee popcorn, but finishing quickly. There's a light dusting of banana and familiar tangs of tin and soap. Pretty poor fare, but at least it's not loud and brash.

I'd forgotten that Carlsberg owns Baltika. Baltika 0 is another wheat-based one, very pale and only slightly hazy. There's a delicious lemon candy aroma and that adds a different sort of sweetness to it. The base is a standard worty alcohol-free weiss but it's quite successfully masked by the flavouring, perhaps more grapefruit than lemon here. Yes it's a little artificial tasting but it's quite nice, like a posh lemonade. Adding syrup is one way of hiding non-alcoholic beer's flaws. My Russian isn't up to much, but I can't see any mention of added flavouring on the can, mind.

The Lithuanian option was a stout, called Go Juodas. It looked convincing in the glass: deep brown with a thick creamy head. There's a strong chocolate aroma and, unsurprisingly, it's hugely chocolatey to taste. It's sweet like a chocolate breakfast cereal though surprisingly light textured and properly stout-smooth. I really enjoyed this. The flavour profile hides the innate sugariness common to non-alcoholic beers. I'm not at all sure I would even have pegged this as alcohol-free.

And I almost missed Tourtel Twist because I didn't think it was a beer. It certainly doesn't taste like a beer, being powerfully sweet, thin of body, with a tacked-on lime and mint taste, like a basic alcopop. I'd complain it's a drink for people who don't like the taste of drink except for the fact it's not drink. It's a sugary fizzy thirst-quencher and doesn't really belong with the others who are at least trying to seem like beer. It's probably not legal to sell pre-packaged 0% ABV margaritas to kiddies, but if it were they'd taste like this.

And that, in a mere six posts, was my Copenhagen. A proper smorgasbord of a beer city it is.