Budweiser is launching a new beer that's missing the one thing that consumers love
Flickr/Grace Smith
A new Budweiser beer has one major difference from the brand's famous brew — it's 100% alcohol-free.
Budweiser Prohibition Brew recently debuted in Canada. The beer is intended to taste precisely like Budweiser while clocking in at 0.0% alcohol content.
Budweiser Canada said the company used "the latest de-alcoholization technology" to create the brew.
"Our goals are to empower consumers with choice and change social norms, and this beer will achieve both," Kyle Norrington, the vice president of marketing at the Anheuser-Busch InBev-owned Canadian brewing company Labatt, said in a statement.
The beer is part of a wider mission at Budweiser to offer an increased variety of beverages with less alcohol. In 2015, AB InBev committed to ensuring that low-alcohol and nonalcoholic beers would represent at least 20% of its global beer volume by 2025.
Low-alcohol beers are generally considered to be those with less alcohol than even the lightest mainstream beers, between 0.5% and 3% alcohol by volume, while nonalcoholic beers range from true 0.0% ABV to the nearly alcohol-free 0.5% ABV. Budweiser is 5% ABV, while Bud Light is 4.2%.
Flickr/Grace Smith
Lower-alcohol beers are catching on internationally, with nonalcoholic beers growing at double the rate of the total beer market in terms of volume in the past five years. Low-alcohol beers' growth was triple that of the wider beer market.
Lower-alcohol beers have thrived in Western Europe, with the success of radlers (beer mixed with soda or juice), as well as in countries, such as Indonesia, with significant Muslim populations who may choose to abstain from alcohol.
But don't expect beer minus the booze to catch on in the US anytime soon. The growth of low-alcohol and nonalcoholic options in the US has been minimal — especially compared with other countries.
So Budweiser Prohibition Brew will probably stay north of the border — at least for now. Budweiser told AdAge that the brand was "excited by the prospect that it could eventually be offered in the US," but that the beer is now available only in Canada.