There are some new, very good, NA beers on the market these days. Untitled Art and Athletic are two brands that are doing great work.

Yes, those are great for NA beers (De Halve Maan's Brugse Sportzot is better). Unfortunately, they're mediocre among normal beers.

Yes, those both make some good NA beers. I wouldn't categorize them as good beers, but they are drinkable.

The Athletic seasonals are way better than their "always available." And the Free Wave is better than the Run Wild for the always available beers. They had an Irish Stout (Emerald Coast) that was indistinguishable. I could have blind taste tested them. There's some fantastic single-hop beers too.

I couldn't get into the Untitled Art. Just too sweet.

> Generally speaking, the flavor of non-alcoholic beer pales in comparison to the real thing.

Ehhh... that's a bit of an overstatement, though I mostly agree.

I just happened to be doing a crapload of bar hopping this last month and got into trying different non-alcoholic beers because they're way more prevalent than they used to be.

They're certainly a lot better than the nonalcoholic beers of yore. And it's also obvious that you're not drinking a traditional beer. Undoubtedly, it has to do with the lack of ethanol present, but I can't help but think it's got to do with the process of producing them. Nonalcoholic beers, from what I've noticed, are usually much less foamy than alcoholic beer.

I will generally still drink alcoholic beer since I don't seem to have alcoholism in me, but I think it's great that people are being given options. When I was younger, I really hated it when people would pressure me to drink or act like I'm an alien for not wanting to drink, and nonalcoholic beer is inconspicuous enough that people can drink socially without the peculiar attitude. Although that attitude seems to have largely gone away anyway.

There's this Danish startup that claims they can put the missing flavour back into the beer using their enzymes:

https://evodiabio.com/yops/ https://science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2022/researchers-ma...

Why drink grain juice when you could drink fruit juice?