You may have heard the term, ‘leaded beer‘ online or through the grapevine. What exactly does the phrase ‘leaded‘ beer mean?
No, it doesn’t have anything to do with bullets, pencils, gasoline, or anything about the heavy-metal element with the atomic number 82, ‘Pb’.
So don’t worry if someone tells you you’re drinking beer that’s ‘leaded’. You don’t have to worry about getting lead poisoning.
What is Non-Alcoholic Beer?
Non-alcoholic beer isn’t exactly free of alcohol. In fact, according to US law, non-alcoholic beer can have an alcohol content of up to 0.5%.
Beers with under 0.5% alcohol content are called “non-alcoholic”, “NA Beer”, “Near Beer”, “Cereal Beverage”, and sometimes over in Europe, “AF beer“.
While there used to be only a handful of NA beers available in the United States, now the options are growing and they’re becoming more and more delicious.
So what exactly is ‘Leaded Beer‘ then?
As opposed to non-alcoholic beer, leaded beer is just beer with more than 0.5% alcohol.
It’s a term that has organically grown amongst online communities about NA beer to reference beer that’s not NA.
The beer you probably grew up knowing and drinking is considered ‘leaded’ and is just a simple term to reference ‘regular’ beer.
But we don’t call it regular beer, because we believe that non-alcoholic beer should become more normalized. We would love to see more craft NA available in stores, bars, and restaurants alongside leaded beer.
If you’ve only had leaded brews and never tried NA beer, we recommend you give NA beer a try. It’s growing wildly popular in the United States and should not be overlooked.
NA beer is a lot healthier than its alcoholic counterpart. So while you don’t have to worry about lead poisoning, you still should be concerned about the negative consequences of consuming too much alcohol.
So whether you’re going completely sober, or just love beer and want to continue drinking it without consuming as much alcohol, we highly recommend giving NA beer a try.
