In one hand was a piece of legislation enticingly entitled The Food and Drink Labelling Regulations 1996 and, in the other, a piece of legal advice I had paid for out of my own pocket.
I had asked a lawyer to tell me whether Nanny State, as a beer of 0.5% ABV, was lawfully allowed to be labelled as ‘alcohol-free’. Given what those regulations said, I was pretty sure it couldn’t, but that’s what I was looking at. The legal answer was a resounding ‘no’.
Nine years later, having along with the rest of us watched, jaw slightly agape at BrewDog’s… how shall we say… journey… I would have probably saved my money and gone with my gut.
The previous year, after what can only be described as a life-changing bender of Olympian proportions, I had knocked the booze on the head for a few months and started what was the UK’s first dedicated alcohol-free beer company – Big Drop Brewing – to scratch a craft-beer shaped hole in my drinking options.
Fast-forward to 2025 and you can’t move for alcohol-free beer/wine/spirits/CBD-tinged/mood-enhancing/ABV agnostic drinks companies and brand extensions. But back then, there was me, Ben Branson (of Seedlip) and Steve Dass (of Nirvana). We were considered visionaries by about seven people and a dog called Trevor. Most people considered us idiots.
However, before I released Big Drop into the world, I needed to know if I could call it ‘alcohol-free’. Big Drop has always been 0.5% ABV and I was confused because Nanny State, at 0.5% ABV, was labelled ‘alcohol-free’.
The regulations set out in detail what could and could not be called ‘alcohol-free’ and they were clear: in order to be labelled as ‘alcohol-free’ a beer must be less than 0.05% ABV. The lawyer agreed with me and so, being a rule-abiding kind of a guy, the first bottles of Big Drop, released in November 2016 weren’t called anything. We didn’t call it ‘low-alcohol’, ‘non-alcoholic’ or ‘alcohol-free’. We just called it… beer, which, to be fair, is how I’ve always viewed Big Drop: it’s ‘just’ beer.
In December 2018, the regulations expired. They simply ceased to exist. Before the expiration, in March 2018, the Government had released a consultation asking for views on what should replace them and whether the threshold for ‘alcohol-free’ should be raised to 0.5% ABV.
Ultimately, nothing came of it, as the Tories, through bouts of Brexit, Covid and trying (and failing) to decide who should be prime minister for more than 10 minutes, turned out to have other/better things to do.
What that has meant though is one of this country’s most innovative and valuable exports – the alcohol-free drinks industry – has been operating without any regulations about what can and cannot be labelled as ‘alcohol-free’. This is obviously far from ideal in such a vibrant sector. So, for many years, the booming alcohol-free drinks sector just got on with it.
Most small, independent producers (including Big Drop), simply decided, in the absence of any actual rules, we would call our 0.5% ABV products ‘alcohol-free’. This put us on a par with almost all countries in the EU, as well as the USA, Canada and Australia (and basically, the world).
No one really seemed to mind, we all got on with innovating the crap out of everything, raising capital, generally paving the way for a shift in the drinking habits of an entire race while the universe got on with the process of entropic disintegration without paying us much heed.
Every now and again, I would get an email from a drinker asking why a 0.5% ABV beer was called ‘alcohol-free’ (and, in fact, I genuinely got one the morning I am writing this article) and I usually responded with something along the lines of that beloved shorthand factoid beloved of journalists everywhere: that an overripe banana has more alcohol but also that there are no actual rules in place, that ‘fat-free’ can include 0.5% of fat, and generally people seem happy.
Then, in September 2023 another consultation was released, asking pretty much the same thing as the last one and pretty much the same thing happened: most people (again) said ‘yes, of course 0.5% ABV should be the threshold for alcohol-free, not least because that’s what we’ve all been getting on with quite happily for the last five years’ – and again the Government didn’t do anything about it. So, again, we all just got on with it.
The alcohol-free drinks sector was clearly, undeniably booming. The seven people and Trevor, being the true believers, had increased to include pretty much every supermarket buyer, wholesaler and pub group, as well as all the people who had grown the value of the UK’s alcohol-free beer category from under £100m to over £400m in just five years. There were dedicated ‘mods’ in supermarkets and pubs were even (whisper it) talking about AF beer on draught – and sometimes even doing it.
Generally speaking though, Big Drop can’t afford to pay for data so I just ask people what they think and pay attention to what people are ordering in my local pub. And more people were taking alcohol-free options seriously. As were my mates…
We’re all in our mid-40s now and of a generation that has traditionally viewed abstinence, in any context, with suspicion. But all of a sudden my peers were regularly taking months off the booze. And, more importantly, talking about all the exciting and delicious drinks that they were drinking instead. Some of them stayed ‘sober’ not because they were worried about their drinking but because it just… worked. You can get as many focus groups as you want to tell you all the things you want about drinking. But ultimately, people are now drinking less alcohol. They just are.
In July 2025, the Government released a white paper, Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England, which includes sections on alcohol. A ‘white paper’ indicates a ‘direction of travel’ for the Government of the day, as opposed to consultations (or ‘green papers’) that simply ask questions of interested parties about possible Government policy. As such, while the Government is clearly interested in reducing alcohol-related harms, what is expressed in this white paper is still only a ‘direction of travel’ but the noises are (broadly) positive.
So far as alcohol is concerned, there are three key takeaways:
1. There will be mandatory requirements for alcoholic drinks to display nutritional information and health warning messaging
2. The Government will support growth in new product categories and support the businesses that sell them to thrive, including consulting on changing the upper strength threshold at a which a drink may be described as alcohol-free to 0.5% ABV
3. The Government will explore options to restrict access to low & no products so they are treated in the same way as alcoholic products.
What do I think about this? I thought you’d never ask…
Mandatory labelling requirements
I have never understood why it is the case (and it is) that if you produce a drink with 1.2% ABV or less, you are required to list all of the nutritional information on your label in the same way that a food would, but the producer of a beer (or wine, or spirit) of higher ABV does not.
It makes no sense and it is perfectly logical that such producers be required to do so. It is not onerous, it is not nanny-state (excuse the pun) and if start-up companies in the alcohol-free drinks sector, often operating on a shoestring, are capable of doing it without falling over and throwing their toys out of the pram, then so is everybody else. Rant over.
Health warnings? Sure. Because, guess what? Alcohol is bad for you. The debate on whether a glass of red wine a day is beneficial or if it’s OK to have a pint every now and again is over. Alcohol is a carcinogen. Let me be very clear, that I say this as a man who very much enjoys alcoholic beer, a glass or three of red wine with his roast dinner and a very infrequent Scotch. But I do so in the knowledge of the harms (and they are multiple, the plural is deliberate) being caused to me. However, I work in the industry and I am not convinced that every drinker is aware, not least because the alcohol industry is, unsurprisingly and understandably, somewhat reluctant to tell them.
My view therefore is that health warnings are both appropriate and inevitable. For a couple of years now, I have been the least popular speaker at the International Beer & Cider Strategies conference. My current schtick is getting up and telling all the big brands, that selling [insert alcoholic brand here] 0.0% won’t last long as an innovation, because eventually [insert alcoholic brand here] will come with health warnings and, perhaps one day, we’ll be buying cans of [insert alcoholic brand here] in plain brown cans with pictures of diseased livers on the front. At which point [insert alcoholic brand here] 0.0% won’t look quite as appealing. No one listens though. Apart from seven people and Trevor the dog.
Support for innovation and descriptors
I think I’ve already made my position clear on what should be considered ‘alcohol-free’ for the purposes of labelling. Almost the entire world uses 0.5% ABV as the threshold below which a beverage may be called ‘alcohol-free’ and it is lunacy that the UK does not have formal rules in place codifying this.
I can only hope that in the next couple of years, legal certainty is brought to bear, meaning it will only have been about nine years this country has operated without regulations on the point.
What any other ‘support’ may look like, I don’t know and it isn’t abundantly clear from this white paper. In a world where taxes are only likely to increase over the coming months and years, I’m not sure an argument for a tax break is going to be well-received by Government but removing VAT on alcohol-free drinks would go a long way to encouraging consumption. I would love to hear what anybody else thinks such support could look like.
Age-gating
I’ve never been particularly bothered about the fact that under-18s are currently prevented from buying alcohol-free beer in supermarkets (primarily as I understand it because it sits in the beers, wines and spirits category, inclusion in which means you’re age-gated).
This is primarily because Big Drop isn’t targeted at under-18s. Drinkers of Big Drop are drinkers of hop-forward, complex-flavoured beers, alcoholic or otherwise. And that is (with all due respect to my Gen Z friends) very rarely someone under the age of 18. Our drinkers tend to be over the age of 30 and our branding and marketing reflects that.
However, I have thought about this a lot more since the white paper was released. What it does is lump all beverages upon which it wants to impose age-gating into the category of low & no and the more I think about it, the more I am troubled by this.
Let’s be very clear: the low & no category doesn’t exist, has never existed and nobody is really sure who invented the phrase – it has no hard definition or borders and ‘low’ is of course a relative term: a low ABV wine could be 5%. A low ABV beer could be 2% ABV. But its common usage over the past 10 years or so has seen it come to encompass a multitude of sins: beers, wines, ‘spirits’, kombuchas, THC/CBD-infused beverages and all sorts of other drinks, some of which completely defy categorisation.
So, riddle me this: if age-gating is imposed on low & no drinks and a family of two adults, one child and two teenagers comes into your pub and orders a pint of alcoholic beer, a bottle of alcohol-free beer, a ginger beer, a kombucha and a can of CBD-infused sparkling fruit juice, should anyone be asked for ID and if so, why?
No one (I think) would argue that a pub should currently ask for ID if serving a <0.5% ABV ginger beer to a child enjoying a meal with their parents. Should the pub ask the teenager for ID for a <0.5% ABV kombucha? How are we regulating THC/CBD in the future (if at all?). Which of those drinks should a pub be asked to enforce age-gating on, and why?
The problem, of course, is that some people consider that alcohol-free drinks are gateways to alcoholic drinks. Some people think that if a teenager drinks a bottle of Big Drop then, before you know it, they will next be found horizontal on a park bench with an empty two-litre bottle of strong, crap cider next to them (note the crap: I like good cider). My view is that these people are utterly wrong. If a teenager wants to get horizontal on a park bench and out of their mind on crap cider, they will go and buy a big bottle of crap cider and drink it, initially while vertical, before later laying down. Whether they drank a bottle of Big Drop a week earlier is going to have very little to do with that decision.
Because alcohol is the gateway to alcohol. The thing causing underage drinking of alcohol (and indeed subsequent overage abusive drinking of alcohol) is not alcohol-free drinks holding open the door to a wicked wonderland of booze, it is the marketing by alcohol companies very carefully and specifically designed to convince us that alcohol is cool.
The possibility for uncertainty and complexity with age-gating on low & no drinks is endless and, if I have learned one thing over the past eight years of running Big Drop, it is that businesses selling drinks, be they supermarkets, pubs, wholesalers or online retailers, do not like uncertainty and complexity. They like ease and simplicity.
If the Government really wants to support businesses producing and selling drinks of <0.5% ABV then imposing age-gating on the ill-defined and, ultimately, nonsensical category of low & no drinks is not the answer.