Europe’s first-ever dedicated non-alcoholic craft beer festival has kicked off in Warsaw, placing Poland on the frontier of the fast-growing alcohol-free beer market while also spotlighting the nation’s wider shift towards mindful drinking.
Europe’s first-ever dedicated non-alcoholic craft beer festival has kicked off in Warsaw, placing Poland on the frontier of the fast-growing alcohol-free beer market while also spotlighting the nation’s wider shift towards mindful drinking.
I feel the English language is in need of an update; while the article does mention NoLo Beers to describe the beers of festival, the two most used words in English are alcohol-free and non-alcoholic - both suggest all these drinks belong to only one category: the 0.0000% category. De-alcoholized drinks are never entirely free of alcohol. This festival celebrates both, which I am totally fine with; so this is not a comment about one being good and the other being bad - this is a comment to vent my dislike the fact that English language lacks a word for ‘(very) low in alcohol <0.5%’ and just uses the (imo false) words that already exists for products that never had any alcohol in it. Imo alcohol-free / non-alcoholic drinks are soda’s, not de-alcoholized beer, wine, etc.
I think it’s generally pretty well understood that they contain a small amount, like decaf coffee. But perhaps non-intoxicating would be a good label.
Decaf is quite a good example. If you order decafinated coffee, the menu doesn’t say non-cafenic or cafeine-free.
The problem isn’t with the words for alcohol-free beer, or non-alocholic but for the ‘containing a little bit of alchohol’. It doesn’t matter to everyone, but for people who don’t drink for religious or (mental-) health reasons they do care. And often the label says it, that’s not the problem. The problem is they’re both described (in English) by the same word, while they’re not the same thing to those people.