Dutch brewery, Heineken, was a pioneer in the non-alcoholic beer movement. In May of 2017, they launched their first NA beer after 2 years of tinkering.
Soon they expanded its reach to over 30 countries, eventually hitting US shelves in 2019.
They called their new NA beer: Heineken 0.0.
Heineken 0.0 was the first non-alcoholic beer to appear in a national TV commercial. The commercial aired during the 2023 Super Bowl.
However, they’ve recently landed in some hot water over that name.
”What is an NA Beer?
Calling it a ‘non-alcoholic’ beer doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t contain alcohol. In fact, U.S. law states that a beverage needs to be under 0.5% alcohol in order to be called an NA beverage.
However, some people still cannot consume beverage with even 0.5% alcohol, due to medical, legal, or psychological reasons.
That’s why there is an entire category of NA beers that call themselves 0.0 beers.
What is a 0.0 Beer?
It’s pretty self-explanatory. When talking about non-alcoholic beers, a 0.0 beer contains no alcohol at all. Not even the legally minimum amount of 0.5%. They have 0.0% alcohol.
NA beers will usually just call themselves “non-alcoholic” when they have somewhere between 0.0% and 0.5% alcohol and label the beer ABV as ‘<0.5%’Â whereas beers with no alcohol are labeled as ‘0.0‘
Heineken USA is Sued for their ‘0.0’ claim
A woman in Louisiana is suing the US branch of Heineken over claims that their ‘0.0’ NA beer actually contains 0.03% ABV.
Based on the current publicly-available information, we haven’t been able to confirm where she was able to come to that conclusion.
However, she is suing them over violating the Louisiana Unfair Trade Practices Act and the state consumer fraud acts.
Did Heineken Intentionally Deceive People?
That’s up to you to decide. While they do claim there is 0.0% alcohol instead of the regular ‘<0.5%‘, their weigh-in at 0.03% isn’t really enough to be concerned about in our opinion.
0.03% is still less than the ABV of orange juice and bread and bananas. This tiny margin of error could be attributed to small amounts of fermentation that naturally occurs in all sorts of things like fruits, cereal, and everyday beverage.
The difference between 0.0% and 0.03% may or may not be out of the control of the brewer depending on the environment the product was stored or shipped in. So there may be a bit of variation from her sample compared to other bottles of Heineken 0.0.
Overall, they are within the legal limit to call themselves an NA beer, but we’ll stay tuned to the case to see if they violated the law by labeling themselves a 0.0 beer.
