Would you drink alcohol-free beer if it was on draught in your local?

Making alcohol-free beer widely available on draught in pubs and bars could help people who are wanting to switch over to alcohol-free beers. 

That's the belief expressed in a new study published in Addiction today. Pubs and bars which participated in a University of Bristol-led trial of the concept actually witnessed an increase in sales of non-alcoholic draught beer.

In partnership with Bristol City Council, researchers from the University's Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group (TARG) recruited 14 pubs and bars across Bristol which were happy to change the drinks that they offered on draught for a limited period of time.

Previous research by the same group, using an online experiment showed increasing the proportion of alcohol-free options make people more likely to select an alcohol-free drink over an alcoholic one.

In the current study, participating pubs and bars offered only alcoholic beer on draught for two weeks, and an alcohol-free option on draught for two weeks, and did this twice (over two months in total). The order in which this happened was randomised. The researchers measured the amount of alcoholic and alcohol-free beer sold, plus total monetary takings, across the different periods.

The researchers learned when an alcohol-free option was available the pubs and bars sold, on average, 29 litres less of alcoholic beer per week, equivalent to 51 pints and a five per cent reduction in sales. However, this was replaced by an equivalent increase in sales of alcohol-free beer, suggesting customers were simply going for a different option. Vitally, there was no net impact on overall monetary takings, suggesting the change wasn’t hurting the takings of the pubs and bars which took part.

Even small changes in drinking behaviour could have an important public health benefit. A five per cent reduction in consumption, if scaled up, could reduce the harms associated with alcohol.

The research team opined: "Although alcohol-free options have been available for a considerable period in many pubs and bars, they haven't had the same visual prominence as alcoholic drinks and are very rarely sold on draught."

The opinion of That's Food and Drink is that whilst we are broadly in favour of the offering of alcohol-free draught beers, ales and lagers, that the flavour and mouthfeel of the alcohol-free drinks must be as good as if not better than their alcoholic equivalents.

My own experience with an alcohol-free beer on draught in a pub I was visiting when I was on anti-biotics was that it tasted nothing like the alcoholic version of the beer. In fact it tasted pretty vile to be honest.