For some craft beer drinkers, less can mean more

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Colleen C. Myles, Texas State University

(THE CONVERSATION) My summers have always been packed with travel – trips to Europe for work and play, and, most recently, a road trip across the American West. At the end of a sweltering day of activities, I’d routinely wind down with some social drinking.

In recent years, though, I started to notice a shift. Beer lists had grown to include more and more low-alcohol options.

Whether I was in Braunschweig, Germany, a suburb of Salt Lake City, or at home in Central Texas, I found myself no longer forced to choose between the likes of Stella Artois or Miller Lite if I wanted something that wouldn’t put me under the table. Now I could expect to find a bevy of local or national options with an alcohol by volume, or ABV, in the 4% to 5% range – below the 5.9% average of a craft beer and well below the 7% India pale ales that had been flooding the market.

I even started seeing more nonalcoholic beers like Heineken 0.0, which was first released in Europe in 2017 and then in the U.S. in 2019.

It seemed to me that low- and no-alcohol beers were becoming much more popular, but I wasn’t sure. So like a good scholar, I decided to look to the data to find an answer.

In a 2020 study I conducted with my colleagues at Texas State...