The first US brewery built only for non-alcoholic beer, fermenting every batch in full rather than taking the alcohol back out.
Athletic Brewing began in 2017 with a problem Bill Shufelt could not solve at a bar. He had stopped drinking in 2013, and what he was handed instead was thin and apologetic. He left a career at a hedge fund, sought out John Walker, a head brewer working in Santa Fe, and the two of them set out to make beer worth ordering that happened to have no alcohol in it.
What they arrived at is what still separates the brewery from most of the shelf. The usual route is to brew at full strength and take the alcohol back out afterward, by heat or by membrane, which costs the beer some of its aroma on the way. Athletic ferments each batch in full and removes nothing, holding the alcohol down by controlling the brew itself, temperature above all. Nothing is stripped at the end and nothing is added to make up for what left.
They built in Stratford, Connecticut, the first brewery in the country given over entirely to non-alcoholic beer, and later a second in San Diego. Two percent of sales goes back to restoring local trails. The range runs from the year-round bottles a shopper already knows by name, Run Wild and Upside Dawn and Athletic Lite, through a stream of limited releases that arrive, sell, and are gone.
- Producer
- Athletic Brewing
- Based in
- Milford, Connecticut, United States
- Founded
- 2017
- Founder
- Bill Shufelt and John Walker
- Sizes
- 355 mL
