Athletic Brewing, Bitburger, Curious Elixirs, Estrella Galicia, Hitachino Nest Beer Sampler (1 × 500 mL + 1 × 473 mL + 2 × 355 mL + 1 × 340 mL + 1 × 330 mL)

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.

Curious Elixirs began in Brooklyn with a question most drinks companies skip: not how to imitate a cocktail, but how to make something worth ordering on its own terms. The answer was to build each recipe the way a bartender builds a drink — real fruit juice concentrates, botanical extracts, bitter roots, salt, heat — and then to number them rather than name them, so the range reads as a set of experiments instead of a lineup of substitutes.

There are ten. A pomegranate Negroni, a spicy pineapple margarita with ancho and jalapeño, a cucumber collins, a blood orange spritz, a cherry and cacao drink built on American oak, a coconut colada, a chardonnay-based sparkler, a bitter digestif poured in two-ounce measures, a wine-inspired red, and a barley lager. Each one carries a botanical the house builds into the recipe rather than adds on top — rhodiola, damiana, ashwagandha, lion’s mane, ginseng.

The New York Times has put them on its best-of list five years running. The house publishes a full panel and a full ingredient list for every drink, including the ones that complicate the sell: which contains gluten, which may pick up a trace from shared machinery, which is best avoided in pregnancy. That is rarer than it should be, and it is why this range is easy to write about accurately.

Kiuchi Brewery has been at work in Naka, in Ibaraki prefecture, since 1823, when the village headman Kiuchi Gihei put a surplus of rice to use and began brewing sake. It stayed a sake house for most of two centuries.

Beer arrived in 1996. A change in Japanese law two years earlier had finally made small-scale brewing legal, and Kiuchi was among the first through the door, launching Hitachino Nest with the owl that has been on the label ever since. The brewery had spent 170 years learning fermentation before it brewed a single beer, which is a longer apprenticeship than most craft breweries get.

What followed was a range that reads like nobody was watching: ale matured in shochu casks, beer brewed with raw ginger, a barley variety revived with local farmers after decades out of cultivation. Sake, shochu, wine and whisky are all made on the same site.

Bitburger has been brewing in the same Eifel town since 1817, which makes the brewery older than the country it sits in. It started as one man’s operation in Bitburg, passed through marriage into the Simon family in the 1840s, and has stayed with them since.

What it makes is Pils, and almost only Pils. That narrowness is the point: a brewery that has poured essentially one beer for two centuries has had a long time to get the bitterness where it wants it, and the Eifel water it draws on has not changed either.

It is one of the largest Pils brewers in Germany and still family-held, a combination that has become rare. In English-speaking markets the brewery puts its beer out under the name Drive.

José María Rivera Corral came back to A Coruña in 1906 after years in Cuba and Mexico, where he had run a grocery in Veracruz called La Estrella de Oro. He named his brewery after it — La Estrella de Galicia — and for the first years it made ice as well as beer.

The company that grew out of it is Hijos de Rivera, and it is still entirely owned by the same family, now in its fifth generation. Everything is still brewed in A Coruña, with Galician water.

The 0,0 is a pale lager in the Spanish manner rather than the German one — maize alongside the barley, lighter through the middle, less insistent on hops. It is made by interrupting the fermentation, so the alcohol is never produced rather than stripped out afterward.