The earliest attempts at crafting nonalcoholic beer in the United States date back to the days of the Volstead Act, when, under Prohibition, the legal alcohol content of any beverage was set at 0.5 percent. Facing certain financial ruin, inventive brewers at companies like Pabst and Anheuser-Busch developed a technique for making “near beer” that could meet this legal threshold. Their method involved fully brewing a standard beer—from mash to boiled wort to hops and fermentation—then boiling off the alcohol until the alcohol content was sufficiently reduced. A second option, developed later in the 20th century, involved reverse osmosis, essentially an elaborate filtering method via distillation that arrived at the same result: a beer at less than 0.5 percent alcohol content, “dealcoholized” from a fully realized base product.
And so it went for nearly a hundred years. Somehow, with all the immense sales growth and large-scale investment in craft beer across the late 20th and early 21st centuries, nonalcoholic beer remained staid—a drinking culture castaway relegated to an afterthought produced by only the largest beermakers.
How quickly the world changes. In 2012, a guy named Bill Shufelt was balancing a high-level career as a trader for a global asset management firm while training for an ultramarathon (as one does). He made the choice to go sober—“a life hack,” in the current parlance.
He linked up with an experienced brewer named John Walker, and together they tested and tinkered, brewing batch after batch in an attempt to create nonalcoholic beer from scratch—no boiling or osmosis or dealcoholization required. It took them years to get the recipe right, and its exact steps remain a closely guarded secret. But in 2018, Shufelt and Walker canned the first commercial shipment from their new nonalcoholic beer brand, dubbed Athletic Brewing Company—an aspirational bit of naming that speaks to the brand’s ongoing remit within the world of high-performance athletes.
Rarely in American consumer history are we given such a clear-cut case of a mono-brand industry disruption of measurable scale and influence. In less than five years, Athletic—no doubt aided by the fiduciary acumen and connections of its co-founder—has been able to raise $226 million and counting in venture capital.
Athletic is, according to Inc. magazine, the 26th fastest growing company in America—that’s any company, not just beer—with an eye-popping three-year revenue growth metric in the neighborhood of 13,000 percent.
https://punchdrink.com/articles/nonalcoholic-beer-golden-age/
