The year was 2008.  I walked into the chow hall at Talil AB.  Grabbed my food, and walked past several refrigerators filled with German-made N.A. Beer.  As curiosity between young men tends to occur, one of us dared each other to drink one of the fake beers.

This is my review of Athletic Brewing Co Lite:

That was a St. Pauli Girl if I remember correctly, and the consensus among all of us that were old enough to drink was that is sucked and it sucked even more NCOs actually walked around making sure nobody underage was drinking NA beer in a dry country.  Its like they’ve never seen the episode of Beavis and Butthead where they buy beer.

So this is the theme until I can drink again after Easter.  Sorry.

Not endored by Winston’s Mom

This is a market however that makes no sense whatsoever.  Do people like beer?  Certainly.  The primary reason why of course is it contains alcohol, which acts as a social lubricant.  It causes the release of dopamine for those of us that are probably alcoholics.  Which is why NA beer is not recommended by 12 step programs—it is close enough to the real thing  that reactions of withdrawal can intensify because that brief hit of euphoria doesn’t come.

Withdrawal however is not the problem I had.  The problem I had was explosive flatulence.  Making NA beer is essentially the same process as making regular beer.  They simply add one step, which is to remove the alcohol.  There are three ways to do it:  distillation, reverse osmosis, and vacuum stripping.  Distillation works the same way your cousin in West Virginia distills whiskey—simply heat the wort and take advantage of ethanol’s lower boiling point to remove it.  Unfortunately heat alters flavors, so reverse osmosis is the other option.  Finally the vacuum method pumps the wort with nitrogen, which binds to the alcohol, and vaporizes it.  All of these sound like a potential reason to cause the apparently delicate ecosystem that is my gastrointestinal tract reject all of this.  Violently.

In the end it might have been the fact I drank all six in one sitting.  Given there is no feedback to how many one drinks other than a functioning set of kidneys, its fairly easy to go through all of them without realizing it.  Athletic Brew Co. touts their awards and promotes their products as part of a healthy lifestyle.  They aren’t entirely wrong, each of these was 20 calories each and has none of the deleterious effects of alcohol.  Except for one thing:  whoever gave them these awards should be shot.  Seriously, this beer made me long for the full-bodied flavor of Coor’s Light.  Athletic Brewing Co Lite: 0.9/5 <0.05%ABV