Brews without the buzz
In Maine, where craft beer is big business, non-alcoholic options are coming into their own.
Woodland Farms Brewery serves fresh beer, both non-alcoholic and regular, at their taproom and patio in Kittery. Photo by Miniature Media.
By Amy Paradysz
WOODLAND FARMS BREWING, the first Maine brewery to add non-alcoholic (NA) brews to its beer list, is seeing NA beers take over more than half of their business by volume. The trick, they say, is producing NA brews tasty enough to tempt regular beer drinkers.
“I can come here and have a couple of beers, then have a couple of NA beers,” says Davis Martin, a regular at the Woodland Farms tasting room in Kittery. “They’ve always got NAs on draft, and they’re all really good. My favorite is the Dark.”
Woodland Farms is part of what’s being called the “third wave,” in non-alcoholic beer—which, by law, has no more than 0.5% alcohol by volume (ABV). The first wave was led by the well-known “near beer” O’Doul’s, which is brewed traditionally then undergoes a process by which most of the alcohol is removed. The second wave was led by Athletic Brewing, a Connecticut-based craft beer company that produces only non-alcoholic beverages—in great quantity. In fact, in 2021 Athletic broke into the top 50 U.S. craft breweries by volume, at no. 27, without selling anything over that 0.5% cutoff. This put them squarely between Maine-based traditional craft beer makers Allagash (no. 23) and Shipyard (no. 46). The third wave is made up of hyper-local and regional craft NA breweries, like Woodland Farms.
Longtime home brewer Patrick Rowan co-founded Woodland Farms in 2017, naming it after his family’s dairy farm even as he set up shop in a strip mall across from Kittery Trading Post. (The tasting room features wood from the old barn, and the brewery’s spent grain goes to feed the cows.)
“In Europe, 1% and 1.5% beers are just as common as 5% beers; Europeans consume NA beer like Americans consume soda,” Rowan says. “So I went to Germany and asked a lot of technical questions. And we were able to put together a method that is a hybrid between how the macro guys like Budweiser and Coors do it and the way the home brewer can do it, which is cooking the beer. We don’t do that. We use a maltose-negative yeast and a special mash profile.”
Craft beer is big business in Maine, which has over 110 craft breweries and, since January, a craft beer company dedicated exclusively to non-alcoholic beer. Two years into sobriety, Rob Barrett, the entrepreneur behind Barrett Made design, architecture and construction company, asked Austin Street Brewery co-founder Will Fisher if he’d ever considered brewing non-alcoholic beer.
“I had considered it, for two reasons,” Fisher says. “One, it’s a booming market. And two, I had cut back on my alcohol consumption quite a bit. Rob and I decided that we’d get together and try every NA beer we could get our hands on. We bought a bunch, sampled it, and determined that even though there were some good options, most of it wasn’t great. Not compared to regular-strength Maine craft beer.”
They launched Portland-based Kit NA Brewing in early 2022 and have sold over 3,000 cases, not including online sales.
“When you’re thinking about getting up early the next morning or driving home, this is an option,” Fisher says. “That’s where ‘Kit’ comes from—that our beer is part of your toolkit for life. The beer is fermented traditionally and fully fermented. No alcohol is removed from the beer; we brew the beer to get it to less than 0.5% naturally.”
Kit NA‘s On Your Mark is the Portland Sea Dogs’ official NA beer sponsor and is being sold during all home games at Hadlock Field this season. Courtesy photo.
Kit NA’s first release was an American Blonde ale called On Your Mark, followed by an IPA called Get Set. Fisher says the next one will be named something like Here We Go and that the those first three releases will be available in a variety pack. Development is underway on that third—and a fourth—0.5% ABV release.
Although Kit NA doesn’t have its own taproom yet, it is available at both Austin Street Brewery locations. Fisher says, “My prediction is that we’ll see breweries produce non-alcoholic or very low-alcohol beers, 1.5–2%, or session beers, especially for tasting rooms.”
Woodland Farms is already doing this. And, as Rowan points out, the health benefits of choosing non-alcoholic brews extend beyond embracing sobriety or being a safer driver. “One of the nice things about NA beer,” he says, “is that a 16-ounce can of our Pointer IPA has only 90 calories and 21 grams of carbs, whereas a standard New England IPA can have upwards of 300 to 350 calories and up to 40 grams of carbs.”
Another bonus is that non-alcoholic beverages can be shipped by mail. Both Woodland Farms and Kit NA do significant business through their websites (wfbrewery.com and kitna.beer).
But the opportunity to belly up to the bar and order a fresh draft NA beer can certainly be worth the road trip.
“We’re becoming a destination for that sort of thing,” Rowan says. “We have a guy in the tasting room right now who said, ‘You know, I haven’t had a draft beer in 10 years. And if I did, you wouldn’t want to meet me.’ And we hear that sort of thing two or three times a week.”
As an entrepreneur, Rowan says he recognized early on that the local beer scene needed high-quality non-alcoholic options and that he wanted to fill that gap in the market.
“Non-alcoholic beer was part our business model from day one,” Rowan says. “But I was a home brewer for 20 years and thought I should brew ‘real beer’ first. Now I realize that non-alcoholic beer is real beer.”
Kit NA co-founder Will Fisher, Production Manager Simon Burhoe and Head Brewer Adrian Beck-Oliver (left to right) visiting Yakima Chief Hops in Washington State. Courtesy photo.
This photo of the Milky Way above Oak Pond in Skowhegan, Maine was shot by John Meader of Fairfield, Maine in 2019.