The 10 Best Non-Alcoholic Beers You Should Drink in 2025, According To Beer Experts

FOR HEALTH-CONSCIOUS beer lovers, the promise of craft-brewed, alcohol-free beers is finally beginning to deliver. Yes, beers without booze finally taste and feel like drinking great beer. Gone are the days of cracking a sad, fizzy O’Doul’s—more a punchline than a beer replacement—as breweries dedicated solely to NA beers, as well as some of the world’s largest and most advanced brewers, have spent years to creating an array of great near beer options.

Best Non-Alcoholic Beers

Our top pick, Designated Dale’s NA Pils, took a year and a half of development to nail, says Aaron Baker, brand director for Dale’s and its parent brewery, Oskar Blues. The biggest challenge, he says, is formulating a beer that’s designed to have the alcohol removed.

You can’t simply make good beer and pull out the ethanol. “The essential characteristics in beer come from the interactions between hops and malt and yeast and alcohol. Everything is tied together,” he says.

All of our picks overcome this technical hurdle through similarly painstaking and thoughtful brewing processes. While the best non-alcoholic beers can definitely help you reduce your alcohol consumption, they still have carbs and calories. So yes, NA beers can still give you a beer belly. And despite most non-alcoholic beer options probably not matching their full-strength counterparts in a blind tasting (though a few do), every beer included is a good example of its style that we enjoy drinking, regardless of ABV, and would be happy to share at a BBQ.

What to Consider

Calorie Count

Just because these NA brews lack the empty calories of alcohol doesn’t necessarily mean they’re low-cal (or low-carb). “Alcohol contributes a lot to the mouthfeel and the thickness of a beer,” says Baker. In an effort to make a zero-ish alcohol beer feel like the real thing, he says, brewers often up the carbs to add body and improve the balance of flavors. All of our picks are on the lower end of the calorie spectrum for their style.

Freshness

Non-alcoholic beer ages and degrades faster due to its lack of that natural preservative, alcohol. Most beers have their canning or bottling date printed on the label or bottom of the can. I check this and aim for less than three months old. Others will have the less helpful best-by date. These can be up to a year after their packaging.

I also only buy NA beers that have been stored in a cooler (never off a room temperature shelf), which significantly slows their aging. NA brews are pasteurized and safe to drink past their peak flavor, but they won’t taste much like beer.

Style

Certain beer styles lend themselves better to NA brewing. This is largely determined by how well the flavors are balanced in a standard example, says Baker. In my testing, yeast-forward wheat beers and sour ales are safer bets. Especially hoppy beers and malty beers—IPAs and stouts—are more difficult to nail. This explains why most NA IPAs feel thin compared to their full-strength siblings, says Baker. I’ll add that I’ve struggled for years to find tasty dark NA brews (though the Guinness 0.0 is a pretty worthy option). Most taste like sweet, under-fermented homebrews.

How We Chose

I’ve been reviewing beers for nearly 20 years and testing non-alcoholic options for seven. To pick our top NA beers, I reviewed my expansive tasting notes from over the years, tasted promising new releases, and retested old favorites. I also consulted with Men’s Health Senior Gear and Commerce Editor Ryan Brower, who is a Certified Beer Server and has been tasting beer and writing about it for over a decade.

For this guide, I sought to identify a best NA option for every broad category of beers, providing delicious options for any mood, taste, or season. Each beer was tasted at least twice, all in the same beer-specific glassware designed to increase the intensity of aroma—revealing flaws or confirming greatness. For each beer, we paid close attention to mouthfeel, how true the beer represented the style, the carbonation, drinkability, and availability. After tasting dozens NA beers combined, we landed on the following 10 best non-alcoholic beers of 2025.