The English website FOODnavigator.com, leading online news source for the food industry for almost 20 years, has published this March 26th an interview by Flora Southey with the co-founder and manager of our favorite beers, Nirvana Brewery, Becky Keane, titled: “Mainstream draft, craft beer, or soft drink? Nirvana Brewery, on competition in alcohol-free.”
Nirvana is the only brand that owns non-alcoholic only brewery in the UK since 2017. It’s manager says that the sector has “totally changed” in 2019.
From the initial lack of interest from both the market and the owners of bars and restaurants (nobody drinks alcohol-free beer, we’re not interested) it has become a “complete and utter reversal of attitudes” whereby businesses were not only interested in stocking alcohol-free beers but were open to selling multiple SKUs. Today, bars and restaurants have several alcohol-free brands knocking on their door every week. Becky says: “People are starting to pay attention.”
About the competition in the non-alcoholic sector, the article says that beer is the trend that has increased the fastest, with a sales increase up 58% in 2018. For Becky, this competition is “helping to grow the category for everyone. “
Nirvana’s customers, she says, “is largely made up of 45 -year-old-plus “craft beer lovers.””
The relationship with soft drinks is also covered in the article. There is competition with non-alcoholic beers in many ways “because, in the past, people may have chosen a lemonade (or soft drink) instead of alcohol. In that scenario, non-alcoholic beer is definitely taking away from that”. According to the article, one key reason why consumers opt for non-alcoholic beer over soft drinks is their nutritional profiles.
According to Becky, “people are trying to cut out alcohol for health reasons and a lot of alternatives to alcohol have loads of sugar. I’d say that alcohol-free beer is the healthiest thing you can drink -apart from water- in a pub. There is no refined sugar in it and is very low in calories – at around 40-50 calories per bottle. It is all-natural, with no artificial sweeteners.”
Nirvana brews beer to low gravity and with less fermentation of the malt, which helps to bring body and mouthfeel to the finished product. Becky says that they “wanted to go back to what makes a beer taste like a beer”; and “we want (non-alcoholic beer) to sit on the shelf next to all the other craft beers (…) we don’t want people to think of it as a totally different product, it is still a beer.”
For Becky, non-alcoholic beer “ideally, in the future, it will just be seen as another style of beer. It won’t be seen as this “whole other thing”. Not everyone is teetotal. Some drinkers also drink non-alcoholic on some days and a lot of people moderate”. She ends by saying that success will come “when most bars have a line dedicated to alcohol-free. That is when it will really have become mainstream.”
At The Blue Dolphin Store, we work to make this happen as soon as possible with the help of Nirvana beers, the best craft beers that you can find in the market and that we offer you, exclusively, in our online store.
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