![]() ![]() It felt good to be conducting an interview in a bar again. A tingle of good cheer seemed to spread through my hand up my right arm and into my chest. I brought the glass up to my lips, and took a long swallow. I took a deep whiff-the Cascade hops, from the Pacific Northwest, had notes of pineapple and hay. I swirled the beer and admired the lacery of foam, as the bubbles slid slowly down the side of the glass. (That 1919 definition of non-alcoholic beer remains the standard today.) American disdain for the liquid called “near-beer”-a derisive tag that is a hangover from Prohibition days, when non-alcoholic beer, defined by the 1919 Volstead Act as beer containing up to 0.5 per cent alcohol by volume (A.B.V.), was the only beer Americans could legally drink-appears to be finally lifting. is still tiny, at around two hundred and seventy million dollars, compared with Europe’s multibillion-dollar industry, it has grown by a third in the past year. Although the N.A.-beer market in the U.S. craft brewers across the continent, including Athletic, Partake, Bravus, Surreal, WellBeing, and Brooklyn’s Special Effects. Five years later, the Total Wine & More chain of superstores carries biscuity stouts and hops-forward I.P.A.s from more than a dozen N.A. Back in 2016, you’d be lucky to find an O’Doul’s-the non-alcoholic swill brewed by Anheuser-Busch-in the far back corner of the deli beer fridge. For the North American non-alcoholic-beer drinker, who was until recently shut out of the craft-beer revolution of the past twenty years, these are hoppy times. ![]()
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