- 0.5 percent ABV
- 25 calories per 100ml
All the beers recommended here are either refreshing, complex, or outstandingly tasty. The Erdinger ticks all those boxes and passes the “aaah” test better than any other.
It’s a weissbier, an increasingly popular beer-type from Bavaria. Containing wheat as well as barley malts and top-fermented using special yeasts, weissbiers have a sour tang and fruity aroma, usually compared to bananas and cloves, that wakes up the taste buds.
Erdinger Alkoholfrei is as good as any of them, despite the lower ABV. It pours with a deep, lacy froth that brings a pleasant sherbet fragrance when you sip. It’s slightly salty on the lips, with a fresh-baked bread taste that goes well with German fare like sausage and mustard but also suits a Greek salad. Impressively, it doesn’t leave the slightly cloying aftertaste that can be the case with full-strength weissbiers.
Erdinger present it as a “refreshing isotonic drink” which I’m not entirely swayed by. Though it has half the calories of fruit juice and does contain vitamins B9 and B12, which play a role in the immune system, I think it might raise some eyebrows if you cracked one open at the gym.
But it definitely works as a reward to yourself on getting home. It’s also one of the most widely available of the beers tested here, found in most big supermarkets. I’d say anyone who hasn’t tried low-alcohol beers should start here.
