My wife queued up at the grocery store the other day, she told me. The cashier began tallying her purchases, but then hesitated. She said she wasn’t qualified to process the purchase of beer and had to call on another cashier qualified to check through beer and wine.
“Does it matter that the beer is zero alcohol?” my wife asked.
“Oh, I see,” the cashier said.
And the person next in line at the cash behind my wife piped up, “Mine are zero-alcohol too,” he said.
Is it just our imagination, or has all this talk about the link between alcohol and cancer sparked a sea change in the habits of casual drinkers? In January of this year, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) released a study of Canadians’ recreational drinking habits. The study dated back to July 2020; so, remember the country was then just four months into the COVID pandemic and most of us were isolating/distancing but not too far from our beer and wine refrigerators.
Based on the study’s responses and new medical data, the CCSA issued new guidelines for responsible drinking. It recommended Canadians should consume two standard drinks or fewer per week. More than that, it concluded, could cause increased risk of cancer or heart disease.
Right after the announcement in January, CHCH TV went to the street recording impromptu Q&A sessions with patrons at a St. Catharines beer store. One man was asked how many drinks he normally consumed in a week: “Maybe a couple of beers. Weekends … maybe five.” Then, the interviewer laid out the new CCSA guidelines – minimum two drinks a week – and his reaction went viral on social media. “Come on, man, two drinks a week? What’s that going to do for you?”
Since the CCSA’s announcement in January, the debate has descended into a battle of statistics. The negative stats point to 15,000 deaths per year in Canada attributed to alcohol use. Meanwhile, a health sciences professor at Brock University told the Toronto Star recently that the CCSA scientists have ignored the fact that responsible drinkers – those using the previous safety guideline of a serving a day – rely on alcohol for healthy stress relief, engagement with community and socialization.
Look at our own unique drinking culture – May-24 weekend, Grey Cup Sunday block parties, beer league hockey, and Newfoundland’s famous Screech-In ceremonies. Brock’s Dan Malleck told the Star that the new two-drinks-a-week guidelines have “created an expectation of behaviour that a lot of people don’t want to meet.” Or, to quote the man at the St. Catharines beer store again: “That’s just not feasible, not in this country!”
Enter no-alcohol beverages! As usual, the marketplace has quickly moved to meet the demand – beer and wine that tastes the way it should, but without the alcoholic drawbacks. Last year, Forbes magazine reported that the no- or low-alcohol beverage industry grew globally by more than 7 per cent, or by about $11 billion.
Remember again, this windfall occurred during the pandemic, when Canadians turned to their fridges for comfort in isolation. In Canada, however, statistics showed in 2022 that alcohol consumption decreased 1.2 per cent. The Forbes stats examined 10 world markets for no- or low-alcohol beverages, including Canada. And here’s a fascinating stat: the largest no- and low-alcohol market in the world today is Germany, home of Oktoberfest, the most famous beer festival in the world.
I noticed non-alcoholic beer a few years ago, tried it, and dismissed the whole idea. It tasted too watery, kind of drab in flavour and generally unsatisfying. Alcohol-free beer, I’ve learned, actually begins life with alcohol in it during the fermentation process – adding sugar or starch to water and yeast. When the concoction is heated gently, however, the alcohol is burned away.
Suddenly in 2022, Danish brew masters came up with a solution, literally. They’ve engineered a yeast, called saccharomyces cerevisiae, which in turn produces molecules called monoterpenoids. They’re found in certain hops, which are added to the non-alcoholic beer at the end of the brewing process, thus putting the flavour back into the beer, lost earlier in the brewing process.
“What non-alcoholic beer lacks is the aroma from hops,” Sotirios Kampranis, a scientist at the University of Copenhagen, told U.K media. “When the aroma molecules are released from yeast, we collect them and put them into the (non-alcohol) beer, giving back the taste of regular beer we love.”
I guess if scientists can create a vaccine to combat a killer virus, brewing no-alcohol beer that tastes like the real thing must be elementary.