Like the aftermath of a really boring party

KaiMarch 7, 2020

The best and worst alcohol-free beers for sale in NZ

The Spinoff Food

Guest writer

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Like the aftermath of a really boring party

Ever-increasing varieties of zero-alcohol beers beckon the sober or sober-curious from the supermarket shelf. But are any of them any good? We investigate.

Ah, non-alcoholic beer. If your immediate thought response to that sentence is “What’s the point?”, look, we don’t blame you.

But The Spinoff is nothing if not brave: we go places others dare not tread. We take on the big issues; tackle the thorny topics. So we figured we better get in a bunch of zero-alc beers, try them and share our thoughts with you, the reader.

Blame our booze-sodden culture, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a non-alcoholic beer market here in Aotearoa. There are parts of the world, Europe especially, where every pub you walk into has a local booze-free beer or two available, but here, if you want something 0%, you better like lemon, lime and bitters, or be ready to fork out $10 on a fancy mocktail. (On that note, please don’t serve sober people orange juice.)

Non-alcoholic beer is made by brewing a beer as normal and then heating it to strip out the alcohol. As alcohol adds dryness, this can result in the beer tasting cloyingly sweet – which was certainly our experience with many of the beers we tried. Perhaps for that reason, I’m not aware of any New Zealand craft brewery that makes a non-alcoholic beer (please, get in touch if you know of any – aliceneville@thespinoff.co.nz). 8 Wired got pretty close with the excellently named Ghost Chips (1%), but it’s available only at limited times in limited quantities. There’s a bunch in the 2-3% range, many of which we reviewed and ranked last year, but below that, the pickings are slim.

So when New Ways Brewing, a Nelson company that brews only zero-alcohol beer, launched in 2017, it looked to be filling a big gap in the market. But sadly, I couldn’t find its beer anywhere, and got no response to an email and a Facebook message.

The majority of the 11 beers we tasted are from Europe, and by no means every non-alc beer on the market, but I did go to three (3) whole different shops. All are 0.0% – I ruled out 0.5 percenters. The blind tasting panel was made up of The Spinoff’s managing editor Duncan Greive, deputy editor Catherine McGregor, awesome drawing guy Toby Morris, and yours truly. Josie Adams kindly conducted the tasting, and we gave each beer a mark out of 10 that was averaged out to produce the final scores. They’re ranked below from worst to best.

– Alice Neville

The full lineup, minus Baltika who was just taking a break, plus the spittoon

11) Rinkuškiai Non-Alcoholic Lager

440ml, $3.49 (Farro Grey Lynn)

Score: 1.1/10

The worst beer in our tasting was this horrifyingly sweet offering from Lithuanian brewery Rinkuškiai. Duncan Greive actively gagged on tasting it. “That’s fucked,” he muttered when he eventually recovered. “Really sweet, but still ends up being nasty,” added Toby Morris.

We tasted all the beers blind, but once the origins of this one were revealed post-tasting, Catherine McGregor was shocked that something so bad could come from a region with a long history of brewing. “What would their grandparents say?! You’d expect that from the Americans, but not Europe. How can you possibly think that’s an imitation of beer?”

10) DB Export GOLD 0.0%

12 x 330ml, RRP $18.99 (sent in by DB)

Score: 1.9/10

We’re patriots here at The Spinoff, but sadly this little Kiwi battler does not do our great land justice. It’s a new release from DB, and the press release promised “an easy-drinking, full-flavoured lager with notes of stone fruit and a smooth malty mouth feel”, made via “an innovative new brewing process which DB has been developing and refining over the last year”.

It started badly, with what Alice Neville described as “a bad homebrew smell”. “Really sweet but also weirdly foul,” was McGregor’s assessment of the taste.

“That’s actively offensive,” added Greive. “I thought we had laws governing what’s allowed to be sold to consumers.”

Morris felt it was “mean-spirited to put that out to the world”. Greive agreed. “Yeah, you’d have to have had a really bad childhood, adolescence and also adulthood.”

9) Warsteiner Fresh

6 x 330ml, $11.99 (New World Victoria Park)

Score: 3.4/10

Tasting conductor Josie Adams chimed in on this one to say the smell was akin to “when you piss on the street after a night out”. Another German offering, it didn’t please Neville, who on taking a sip said, “Ugh, that’s gross.” Greive’s take was: “Doesn’t smell of anything, doesn’t taste of anything”, while Morris equated it to “soundless music”.

8) Bitburger Drive Zero

500ml, $1.70 (Countdown Surrey Crescent)

Score: 3.5/10

The pleasingly named Bitburger hails from Germany, but it did not particularly please our taste buds. The smell was yeasty, but on the palate it was disconcertingly sweet. “Tastes like sugar water,” said McGregor. Greive was the most conciliatory, saying, “I don’t mind it, just because it doesn’t aspire to be anything and achieves that.”

7) Peroni Libera 0.0%

6 x 330ml, $12.99 (sent by PR)

Score: 4.5/10

This was another PR freebie, sent to us when this new booze-free version of the perennial green bot favourite launched in New Zealand. We reached it about midway through the tasting and fittingly, found it very middle of the road. Which, in zero-alc beer terms, is still bad. “It tastes amazing compared to the last one,” said Greive (the preceding beer had been one of the bottom two). “There’s a little bit of a citrussy thing, but it’s a bit thick and syrupy. It’s still an abomination.” Neville felt it tasted like “nothing”, while Morris said he had no feelings about it whatsoever.

6) Baltika 0

450ml, $1.99 (New World Victoria Park)

Score: 4.6/10

“Smells of nothing, tastes of nothing, waste of bloody time,” was Greive’s assessment of the only Russian beer in the tasting. Toby Manhire subbed in for his namesake for this beer, and felt it tasted like “20% Rheineck, 80% water”. Neville was disconcerted by its lack of smell, finding it quite sweet but detecting a slight dryness at the back of the palate that made it “not as bad as some of them”.

5) Birra Moretti Zero

3 x 330ml, $8.49 (Farro Grey Lynn)

Score: 5.4/10

With a dashing hat-wearing Italian man on the label, this was arguably the most aesthetically pleasing of all the beers we tried, but as this was a blind tasting, style was irrelevant. Greive detected “some sort of marzipanny lolly cake fucking not right thing” going on on the nose. To drink, it wasn’t terrible. “It least it’s got taste,” said McGregor. “It’s more of a sour taste”. “Yeah it’s got some taste, but that taste is not beer,” said Greive. “At least it’s not sweet,” said Neville. “It feels a bit like when you pick up the wrong beer at a party,” added Morris.

4) Heineken 0.0%

6 x 330ml, $14.49 (New World Victoria Park)

Score: 5.6/10

“Smells a bit like wees,” said Neville on getting a whiff of the Heiny, but on tasting, said “it’s not horrible. It’s cold and fizzy”. Greive thought it tasted like “how I remember beer tasting as a child. It’s quite drinkable. I was pleasantly surprised”. Morris reckoned it tasted like “a generic beer”, to which McGregor added it would be fine “if you just wanted something cold to hold in your hand at a party”.

3) Rinkuškiai IPA

440ml, $3.99 (Farro Grey Lynn)

Score: 6.1/10

This was much better than its Lithuanian stablemate (see 11). “I reckon that must be the IPA,” said Greive, who had glimpsed some of the beers in the office fridge prior to the tasting. “It presents as a beer and then reveals its true nature, which is a sugar drink. That said, I think it’s probably the best so far.” It had a definite bitterness, which the tasters praised, though it made Neville feel a little uneasy because it was a fake, almost unpleasant bitterness, rather than a delicious hoppy bitterness. Still, not bad.

2) Asahi 0%

330ml, $4.99, Farro Grey Lynn

Score: 6.4/10

Neville was absolutely gobsmacked at having to fork out five bucks for this – the same price as, say, a Garage Project Garagista – but then saw it at New World for a dollar cheaper. “Slightly sour, but refreshing,” was how McGregor described the Asahi. “Not unpleasant,” added Neville. We all agreed it didn’t really taste like beer, however. “If someone told me that was a kombucha or a variation on iced tea, or like a Club Mate or something, I’d believe it,” said Morris.

1) Bavaria 0.0% IPA

6 x 330ml, $8.99 (New World Victoria Park)

Score: 7.5/10

Lots of good things have come out of Holland – gouda, clogs, the Hawke’s Bay meatball, liberal attitudes to marijuana and so forth – and now, the Dutch have given us a decent zero-alc beer. It had an “almost gooseberry” aroma, reckoned McGregor. “That’s like a proper smell,” agreed Greive. “I would smell that voluntarily.” Taste wise, it was the best of the bunch. “Yeah, that’s like a generic beer,” said Neville. “It’s OK. There’s a slight bitterness.” Morris agreed. “It’s like a Lion Red or a Tui.” But Greive felt it was better. “For something that looks like a beer, it’s a refreshing, non-obnoxious drink.” McGregor summed it up, saying, “I don’t think you could get a zero-alcohol beer tasting much better.”

Katy Barfield at Spark Lab’s Future of the Future event (Photo: Supplied)

KaiMarch 5, 2020

Five takeaways from the entrepreneur tackling food waste on a massive scale

Alice Neville

Deputy editor

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Katy Barfield at Spark Lab’s Future of the Future event (Photo: Supplied)

Scary amounts of food are being dumped by the commercial food industry on a daily basis. In 2014, Katy Barfield decided to do something about it by founding Yume, an online B-to-B marketplace for surplus food. Here are five important points from her recent talk in Auckland.

Three thousand cartons of Coco Pops. Nearly five tons of turkey breast fillet. Fourteen boxes of egg yolk powder. Five hundred and seventeen cartons of slow-cooked Mexican beef chuck.

When you think of food that’s potentially going to waste, the above is probably not what comes to mind. You might think of wilted lettuce or stale bread, but the reality of the problem is much bigger, in all senses of the word.

Because the items mentioned above are a few of the deals currently on offer on Yume, an Australian wholesale marketplace for surplus food. Its founder Katy Barfield is a food rescue veteran who initially approached the problem on a retail level with her organisation SecondBite, which rescues surplus fresh food from a range of suppliers and redistributes to those in need – a model similar to New Zealand outfits like KiwiHarvest and Kaibosh.

But she soon realised while that model is important and commendable, a big part of the problem is commercial food waste, which nothing was being done to combat. “I realised quickly we could have much more impact if we created a B-to-B [business-to-business] platform and moved serious volume,” she recalls.

In Australia, 7.3 million tonnes of food is discarded each year, 4.1 million tonnes of which is from the commercial food sector. It’s estimated that between 400,000 and 600,000 tonnes of that is perfectly good food that could, and should, be eaten.

So in 2014, Barfield founded Yume, an online platform that connects suppliers and buyers, with surplus food posted for at least 20% below wholesale price. Last week, she spoke in Auckland as part of Spark Lab’s Future of the Future series. Here are five takeaways from the talk and a follow-up interview with The Spinoff.

The scale is mind-boggling

Barfield recounted a food rescue operation Yume undertook involving a cancelled order of Tasmanian tuna. A supermarket chain had ordered the tuna to be sold as part of a salad pack where each component was individually wrapped. It soon realised, however, that tuna was not the most aesthetically pleasing product to be encased in a see-through pouch. It looked like cat food, in short, and no one wanted to buy it.

So they cancelled the rest of the order, leaving the supplier with 27.5 tonnes of perfectly good tuna encased in 550,000 little pouches that was destined to be buried. Yume stepped in, however, and managed to sell the lot – much to smaller retailers such as sandwich shops.

Often it’s food that’s nutritionally barren, so can’t be donated

A large food manufacturer once approached Yume about 14 tonnes of artificial sweetener it no longer required because it had been removed from the ingredients of a certain product. “We thought oh my god, what are we going to do with that?” says Barfield.

The solution? “My team found a pharmaceutical company that used it in the coating for their tablets and sold the lot. Extraordinary.”

The likes of cocoa butter and lactose powder also come up fairly often – things you see on ingredients lists on the back of boxes.

Barfield now has alcohol in her sights. “Huge amounts of alcohol get crushed every day, because only six months is left on the date instead of the eight months that’s required from the major liquor houses.

“That we will move on at some point, but we need to be really strategic,” she says, adding that events are one obvious target area.

Katy Barfield speaking at Spark Lab’s Future of the Future event (Photo: Supplied)

There are many reasons food can be unfit for sale, but perfectly fit to eat

Product lines being deleted at short notice or promotions getting cancelled, like the tuna mishap above, is a big issue, but mislabelled products also make up a large proportion of surplus food. It may sound like red-tape silliness, but there are good reasons why a mislabelled product can’t be sold through the usual channels. “Imagine if you leave off a potentially life-threatening allergy,” says Barfield. “But now you can go on the platform and fully disclose the ingredients, and it could go into a commercial kitchen.”

Shelf life is another big issue – many supermarkets require at least six months before the best-before or use-by date to sell a product – as is weight. “The minute something’s underweight even by 5g, it can’t be sold because it’s labelled.”

Wasting food is ingrained in the industry

Companies have budget set aside for burying food in landfill, says Barfield, and often don’t want anything to rock the boat. She tells a story of a canned food business that had 15 pallets of surplus beans. The lot was sold through Yume, but then the order was stopped.

“The CFO had three buckets of budget – one was the donations budget, one was the discount budget, and one was the landfill budget. The donations and discount buckets were full, but the landfill bucket was not so full. So he thought, ‘Bury it’. That’s the kind of logic we deal with.

“We said ‘this does not make sense – you’re going to bury it, but we could give you a return on it’. They acquiesced, but this is the way the industry is wired. Food waste is just business as usual, it’s factored into their profit and loss. It’s a budget line, so if you’re trying to balance the books and you don’t want to attract the attention of the CEO, you don’t want any of your buckets to overflow.”

Government has a role to play, but legislation is not the only option

In 2016, France banned supermarkets from throwing away food that could be donated. “Legislation can help,” says Barfield. “That’s the stick methodology, but there’s also the carrot methodology, which for me is a bit more appealing.

“Government is the biggest procurer of food in most countries – if you think of healthcare, corrections, defence, aged care. They provide services and food for millions of people, and if they mandated to buy X percentage of product through a platform like Yume, they would significantly move the dial.

“I think that’s the role the government can play more than just legislate without necessarily having the framework in place to deal with it.”

The industry is still throwing away a huge amount of food, and there’s no doubt it’s happening in New Zealand

“It’s business as usual, it’s just been the part of what they do. Let’s get them to admit there is a problem and not feel shame about it,” says Barfield. “Part of the problem is lack of visibility – sometimes it gets buried on their own land.”

Barfield says she’s very interested in setting up Yume in New Zealand, because we have some food industry giants based here – Fonterra, to name one. So watch this space.