Why I’m drinking non-alcoholic beer at the office
Forget sparkling water or soda. My new favourite desk-side beverage is non-alcoholic beer, and it makes my coworkers look twice
I REMEMBER THE first time I did it in the office. It felt risky – naughty, even. I studied my surroundings, looking over my shoulder to make sure my boss wouldn’t catch me. I didn’t want to be reprimanded, or worse, judged. Safe in my isolation, I let loose, opened up, and let it rip. Snap!
It was about 4 p.m. on a Tuesday or a Thursday. I can’t remember exactly when, only what I felt: drained. I hadn’t just hit the proverbial afternoon wall – I was slammed against it, pancaked by a car. If you drove in reverse, I would fold out like a paper accordion. Green tea and expensive smoothies didn’t feel up to snuff, and the thought of a third cup of mocha from the break room coffee machine sounded unappetising.
Without giving it any real thought, I wandered to our office bar – a perk of working for a lifestyle magazine – and plundered the minifridge. I assumed I would find a chilled Diet Coke left behind from our many end-of-week happy hours. That’s when I saw it: a can of cold beer. Could I really drink a beer at work? I asked myself. It felt absurd. But then, my eyes fixed on what was printed on the side: “0.0% alcohol.”
The rise of non-alcoholic (NA) beer has been a curious yet unsurprising phenomenon. Besides accommodating teetotalers, the proliferation of NA beer is the result of a generation prioritizing health and wellness. In January, the American Brewers Association published a survey showing a 111 percent increase in the volume of NA beer sales between 2021 and 2025. Major players like Heineken, Guinness, Corona and Coors all have alcohol-free beers. Meanwhile, new brands like Athletic Brewing, Best Day, and BERO – founded by Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland – have sprung up, dealing exclusively in non-alcoholic drinks.
Despite NA beer’s explosion in popularity, I never thought about drinking it during work hours, let alone at the office. It seemed harmless on the surface. But something changes when you march past your bosses in the mid-afternoon with a Heineken in hand. Suddenly, I felt 13 again, absconding to my room with a nudie mag in my jacket. Little did I realise that what I was doing wasn’t all that out of the ordinary.
Low-ABV beer has a place in history. Medieval Europeans imbibed low-ABV alcoholic beers, often for breakfast, called “small beers.” Non-alcoholic drinks took off in the United States during the 19th-century temperance movement and through Prohibition. Drinkers needed legal alternatives to booze. Companies obliged, helping launch the soda and juice industries as we know them today. After the 21st Amendment was passed in 1933 to repeal Prohibition, NA beers only maintained a minor presence in the marketplace.
“They were relegated to a dusty corner of the beer aisle,” says Tate Huffard, founder of Best Day Brewing.
Launched in 2021, Best Day was born out of Huffard’s personal mission to ease up on drinking but not necessarily quit. He was dissatisfied with the implicit messaging of abstinence underlying non-alcoholic beers, to say nothing about quality.
“I wanted a great-tasting beer, and a cool brand that stands for something,” he tells me. “It occurred to me: What if I could make a great beer that happens to have no alcohol, and it’s not oriented around sobriety?”
Huffard says there is still a tension between public perception and reality regarding non-alcoholic beers. In 2018, when author Ruby Warrington published the nonfiction book Sober Curious, she sparked the namesake movement that explores a different approach to reducing alcohol consumption. Adherents choose to stop drinking alcohol with the intention of improving mental and physical health. But the resulting spread of sober-curious lifestyles has only partly increased the demand for NA drinks. According to Nielsen IQ data, over 93 percent of the people who buy non-alcoholic beverages also purchase alcoholic ones.
“People are finding these beers because they’re just different beers,” says Huffard.
This leads to what Huffard calls “non-beer occasions,” those times when sodas or sparkling waters may be the default beverage. That’s where and when non-alcoholic beer has caught on. So when I tell Huffard I’ve been experimenting with drinking NA beers at the office, smack dab in the workday, he’s unfazed.
“Is it a little naughty? That’s because it tastes like beer,” he tells me. He acknowledges the initial schism, where it feels super inappropriate to crack open a cold one by virtue of time and place. But it’s a small hump to get over. “It quickly changes from that naughty feeling to, this is totally good. I should enjoy my lunch with a great beer.”
Sure, Huffard has every reason to advocate drinking NA beers more often – it’s quite literally his business. But I’ll be damned, the NA beer I had on that afternoon not so long ago was exactly what I needed. For days afterward, I hogged our office supply, either with my lunch or as a pick-me-up whenever I couldn’t stomach another coffee. What once felt like a grave sin started feeling like a cool vice. And without the buzz of alcohol, I stayed focused. Alert. I got shit done. I felt invincible. Until I didn’t.
Though it has no alcohol, NA beer is still beer. It’s filling; Heineken 0.0 has 69 calories per can. That’s not insignificant. Although cold beers on a random Wednesday made me feel jazzed spiritually, after a couple weeks, my gut felt differently. My waistline, too. I slowly returned to drinking water or a Diet Coke. But every so often, you’ll find me at my desk pulling the tab on another alcohol-free beer. And I’ll do it without shame. Because, when my boss found out I was writing this story, he made his feelings pretty clear: “That’s fucking cool.”
This article originally appeared in Esquire US.
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