| FEATURE NEWS |
| All-Free Beer All-Free is a new beer made by Japanese whiskey and brewery Suntory. But All-Free isn’t a regular beer. It’s a “beer-like beverage” that contains no alcohol, sugar or calories, the latest entry to the alcohol alternatives market. Suntory was founded in 1899 by Shinjiro Torii, a Japanese businessman who wanted to introduce western-style spirits to Japanese consumers. His first offering was a sweet wine called Akadama that was wildly successful, though Torii was to become far more famous for whiskey. Suntory launched All-Free in Japan in 2010 and has since sold seven million cases. Ten years later, the timing seemed right to launch All-Free in the United States, explained Nakai at the tasting. “Even though the U.S. non-alcohol beer market is still small,” “All-free is produced using the same ingredients as our premium beer,” explained Kato. The beer relies on spring water, hops and malted barley, crafted according to the same process the company uses to make its traditional beers. The difference is the beer makers stop right before the fermentation step, which is why All-Free contains no alcohol. |
| No Alcohol Bud Is Coming A big name is joining the burgeoning nonalcoholic beer market: Budweiser.Another big name – retired NBA star Dwyane Wade – helped the big beer brand create Budweiser Zero, a 50-calorie beer with no alcohol, which is now rolling out nationwide. Sales of nonalcoholic beers have risen 40% this year in dollars and are up 30% in volume Bud Zero has a crisp taste with enough hop bitterness and grain character to notice. Bud Zero is now getting a full national launch. Initially It will be available in 12-packs of 12-ounce cans/bottles and 16-ounce single cans due in December. Oksar Blues- French's Collab Craft brewery Oskar Blues has teamed up with French’s mustard for the collaboration no one asked for. They are making a mustard beer, a hazy golden wheat beer brewed with lime, lemon, tan- gerine, passionfruit and yellow mustard. The beer clocks in at 5.2% alcohol. It will debut Aug. 1, Oskar Blues has put the recipe online for home brewers. |
Sept. 2020
| Put A Pickle In Your Beer Try putting a pickle in your glass of beer for a special treat.. It works best with lighter beers and the reasoning is simple: The pickle gives the beer flavor— something it desperately needs—and the salt tastes particularly welcome on a hot, sweaty day (it’s the electrolytes). The gentle sourness imparted by the pickle is balanced by whatever bitterness is present in your tallboy, and the whole thing is quite refreshing. Also, you get to eat the beer-soaked pickle when you finish your beverage. It’s good! After about a minute of letting it soak in, though, it came alive. The pickle added a genuinely nice salty, tangy element that paired nicely with the crisp, light beer. Don't worry it can't become overly pickle-y, but the longer the pickle soaked, the more pronounced the flavor became, You don’t need to love pickles in order to enjoy it; as long as you don’t hate it, give it a try. You Should Have Bought Boston Beer Forget kicking yourself for not buying gold recently as its price soared you should kick yourself for not buying shares of Boston Beer which saw shares surge more than 12 percent in the past month as the company's Truly Hard Seltzer is smashing sales during the coronavirus pandemic. CEO Dave Burwick said in a statement. "The growth of the Truly brand, led by Truly Hard Lemonade, has accelerated and continues to grow beyond our expectations." Meanwhile, the Twisted Tea brand "continues to generate double-digit volume growth rates as volume for the Samuel Adams and Angry Orchard's brands continue to decline due to the pandemic's impact on on-premise retailers. Aluminum Can Shortage Hurts Breweries A shortage of one of the most mundane items in daily life -- the humble aluminum can -- means beer fans are likely to find that some of their favorite brews are out of stock right now. The supply problem is prompting brewers like Molson Coors, Brooklyn Brewery and Karl Strauss to cut back on the breadth of brands they sell and exacerbating concerns of out-of-stocks. One major factor is the coronavirus and changing habits related to it. Beer that would have ended up in kegs at restaurants and bars has shifted, along with other kinds of alcohol, to being sold in retail stores and through online channels and consumed at home -- often in cans. The boom in pantry loading in the spring has compounded the problem by throwing brewer supply chains out of whack. Demand for the can was already strong before the pandemic. Brewers increasingly turned to the vessel during the past 10 years. Beer sold in cans accounted for 50% of all beer sold in 2010 and 60% in 2019, a 20% increase, according to the National Beer Wholesalers Association, a trade association for US beer distributors. Another factor: the White Claw-driven hard seltzer trend. The fervor for those drinks has spurred shortages in the tall, slim varietals of the 12- ounce can, which has become a popular format for alcoholic sparkling seltzers, light beer and some craft brands. he "unprecedented demand" for cans has prompted US manufacturers to take the unusual step of importing billions of empty cans from overseas, according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. Can producers such as Broomfield, Colorado-based Ball Corp. (BLL) and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Crown Holdings (CCK) are also adding lines and building new facilities in America, but those aren't expected to be operational until at least a year from now. In particular, the turnaround time for shrink-sleeve cans, in which plastic labels are shrink-wrapped onto containers, has grown to 4 to 5 weeks from 4 to 5 days and the printed cans have doubled in price. |
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