To find out more about the wonderful world of AF/NA Beer and to check in with me head to www.instagram.com/sober_boozers_club
This episode is not brought to you by any sponsors because nobody wants to sponsor me.
To find out more about the wonderful world of AF/NA Beer and to check in with me head to www.instagram.com/sober_boozers_club
This episode is not brought to you by any sponsors because nobody wants to sponsor me.
Welcome to the Sober Boozer Club podcast, a place where we can talk openly and honestly about addiction, sobriety and, strangely enough, beer. I'm Ben, I'm an alcoholic and for the last two years, I've been sampling some of the finest alcohol-free beers the world has to offer. Each week, I'll be joined by a different guest to discuss their own lived experiences on all things related to the world of low and no alcohol beverages. So pour yourself a tipple, relax and let me welcome you to the Sober Boozers Club. In today's episode, I talk to Martin Dixon from Alcohol-Free World, and I'll be honest, this episode is for myself, because Martin is an absolute legend in the world of alcohol-free beer. Indeed, he's reviewed over 1,400 alcohol-free beers since starting his Instagram page, and he was the first person I came across when I stopped drinking, so he really was significant in my journey into sobriety. So it's an absolute pleasure to have him on this episode. So, martin hello. Thank you very much for agreeing to join me today. How have you been doing? I'm great, I'm great.
Speaker 2:Really appreciate the invitation, ben, so looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Well, I think I've said to you before, you were one of the first people that I discovered when I stopped drinking and when I still wanted to carry on drinking beer, and it was pages like yours that made me kind of realize that, you know, my life didn't have to end, or I didn't have to stop enjoying the things I enjoyed, just because I was going sober.
Speaker 2:When you shared that with me. That was one of my honestly favorite moments of of running the social media about alcohol free beer that I do and I shared that story with my wife and even she was kind of like, oh wow, so things like that actually make a bit of a difference. Sometimes I was like well, yeah, you know, yeah, massively massively.
Speaker 1:I can remember the day that I decided I had to stop. Well, to be honest, the day that I decided I had to stop, it didn't start until half five, so maybe the day after. But finding your page and seeing how many beers there were, and I kind of thought to myself okay, I'm going to order loads of them and I've never looked back. So it absolutely makes a difference, and so thank you for doing what you do. But talking about early sobriety, your kind of journey into sobriety was a little bit different to most people's, which I think is important to mention, because not everybody's journey is the same, is it?
Speaker 2:I agree with you 100% on everyone having a different sobriety journey, and I'm also aware that sometimes when I talk about my lack of journey, it can seem somehow a little bit flippant or somehow dismissive of people who are experiencing things in a totally different way, and it has never been my intention to be so. But the only sobriety experience I've personally ever had is my own one, so I'm happy to share that. But I'm also, as you say, very mindful and very respectful that other people's own journeys may be very different.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's the thing about alcohol-free beer, and it's something that I think as a member of the sober community, because I have to be. I think something that we really need to remember is that alcohol-free beer is for everybody and the growth of alcohol-free beer only helps everybody. Obviously, there are some alcoholics that don't touch alcohol-free beer because it's triggering for them, and that's their own choice and that's okay. But for people like myself, the more people that are drinking this stuff, the more the industry grows. It only makes it better, and I think it is important to realize that. Like you say, everybody's journey is different and not everybody gets to sobriety because of some big dramatic event that happened for them. Sometimes you just happen upon it and think, okay, I don't need to drink, um, and that's fine, isn't it?
Speaker 2:I think, your last comment. There is exactly what happened with with me. I was not someone who thought, wow, okay, I need to, I need to stop drinking. Uh, I've been living in france for nearly a decade. It was 2009 and I did dry january, which I'd done three or four times over the previous decade, always found that dry january was kind of, yeah, a nice break to start the year, and then february would roll around and social stuff would kick off again, and then I'd start drinking pints again and doing the same things I always used to do.
Speaker 2:And then in 2009, I started with a dry January and then it rolled on to sort of six weeks.
Speaker 2:Seven weeks took up most of February, and then suddenly I was like you know what I actually really enjoy this? Yeah, and some of the social situations that I'd been doing in January were then just the same in February. So I didn't really feel that that was difficult. So I, just, being slightly a stubborn person, I just got it in my mind that, okay, let's just run with this for a bit longer and then, rather than making a very quick decision, to just kind of grab a drink the next time I'm in a situation where I think grabbing a drink would be just what I think I should do. I'm actually going to think carefully about the next moment that I have a drink, just so I don't regret having stopped something that I was enjoying so much.
Speaker 2:So I think, for probably about the next four months of the first six months of not drinking, I did have a lot of bailing from evenings at 8 30 and going somewhere at 9 30 and just thinking to myself oh okay, I'm not enjoying this. Yeah, uh, no, uh, it's not working. I'm gonna go home, I'm not gonna have a drink, but just no, I was doing my head in, just being in stamina goes, doesn't it very quickly?
Speaker 1:when, uh when, you remove alcohol from the situation, you kind of realize that if, if something isn't serving you, then there's no want to be there anymore, which is, I mean, it's a good thing, I think exactly, and I was.
Speaker 2:I'd made a conscious effort that that I was still in the same places and still doing very much the the same thing. So I would. I would go to the same bars, the same restaurants, see the same people. Um, I was at that time it was france and the alcohol free option was san pellegrino or nothing, um, so I could have Perrier, but the bubbles were always a bit big, so it was San Pellegrino if I was on a session. So then really, I was kind of totally alcohol-free and I was ticking off the experiences that I would do for the first time without alcohol, whether it was kind of going to the first big gig, which I remember was a killer's gig in Paris, and it was kind of going to the first big gig, um, which I remember was a killer's gig in paris. It was fantastic, um, but I'd always associated going to a gig with having a beer. So doing that for the first time was like a okay, tick that one off yeah, we've done that, it was fine yeah, great.
Speaker 2:Next, and then I moved through work, social, social events, work, end of quarter drink ups, all of those tick those off, just things. You know. Life wasn't. You know, life had just broadly stayed the same for me, but I was just kind of enjoying it, without ever having had a drink which, thinking back since probably about the age of 16, 15, 16, don't want to get the publicans of tumblewels into too much trouble but, um, yeah, certainly, since the start of sixth form, yeah, I'd not had more than you know outside of dry january. Three or four days without alcohol, yeah, so I also.
Speaker 2:I also did feel my brain starting to the term I would use is like rewire itself a little bit, and I have been aware subsequently of people who've tried to engage me on this have talked about kind of the pink cloud that you can feel that you're on, where, after kind of four or five months, things do suddenly seem kind of brilliant and wonderful and it's almost as if everything's been freshened up, the server cabinet has been rearranged, everything's been plugged back in a much more ordered fashion, yes, and you have that kind of buzz for a little while where you're like, wow, this is yeah life can be amazing and then all of a sudden it all comes crashing down and you go oh, actually this is the same old life, but you know, you've, you've kind of you've already done it, you've got through it, like sobriety or giving up alcohol.
Speaker 1:It's kind of. For me, for the first month maybe, I felt I felt horrible personally, and then everything kind of fell into place and, like you say, you get the pink cloud and I suddenly thought, wow, my life, my life can be amazing, my life can be anything. And then fast forward 12 months and I was just somebody that doesn't drink, I didn't feel incredible because of about sobriety is that life doesn't change, and I think that's a good thing because it's literally just removing alcohol from your life. That's all it is. And, as you said, you know, going to gigs, doing the firsts. Once you've done it and you realize that you don't miss the alcohol and you don't need anything else alcohol and you don't need anything else.
Speaker 2:I remember I did a. The ultimate first for me was a stag week in Vegas in 2011, with big friends of mine from kind of the previous two decades, scattered all over the world, meeting up in Las Vegas for between four and seven days, depending on who was from where and how long you were staying, huge amounts of testosterone in the room at any one time and I didn't feel the slightest temptation to drink alcohol. I was planning the stag do as well. So there was a bit of phoning ahead and making sure that bars had San Pellegrino for me, because alcohol-free beer wasn't really a thing for me yet. But that was kind of the ultimate hurdle for me, and once I'd done that for six days without even registering a glimmer of temptation.
Speaker 1:That's when you realize you really don't need it. Isn't it a glimmer of temptation? That's when you realize you really don't need it, isn't it? Um, that's whether you're you know, whether you're someone who struggles with alcohol, or just whether you're somebody that has decided, for whatever reason, not to drink once. Once you do something like that, there's kind of you realize there's not a need for it at all. So, talking about alcohol-free beer and for lack of it, back then, when did it all start for you, this alcohol-free beer craze?
Speaker 2:Me and alcohol-free beer. It's kind of a two-stage process because literally the first alcohol-free beer that I remember trying and this is beyond me being old enough to remember when Barbican came out in the 80s or when Calibre was out in the 90s with the Billy Connolly advert so I can remember that and I was aware of it. But my first experience with alcohol-free beer after I stopped drinking I do remember it vividly I was in a hotel in Jordan in November of 2009. There was a Premier League soccer game on and I'd noticed they had some I think it was Bavaria 0.0 in the fridge.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So I ordered one, poured it out. It looked very beery, smelt very beery. I took three sips of it and decided it was so close to beer that I couldn't drink it. Okay, and that shocks me a little bit because I've tasted that stuff since and it's not very good. But just for me, something about seeing that that amber, gold colored liquid with a sudsy head in a glass that broadly smelt of beer as I drank it yeah, this was 10, 11 months into the time. I'd not had a drink At that moment. I was just like, okay, I don't fear the alcohol in this, but just something in this glass feels like a path that I'm just kind of.
Speaker 1:Not interested in.
Speaker 2:It's not worth giving up the not drinking that I enjoy so much to drink this thing. That really isn't great, but it's set my head thinking about stuff that I don't really want to think about. So I filed alcohol-free beer for a while under Pandora's box. Let's not open that for the time being, because I kind of like things how they are. Roll the clock forward probably about two years, so 2012,. I was spending a lot of time in Germany for work and I was meeting new colleagues and it's Germany, so a big thing of that is you go out in the evening and German colleagues of mine mine. I rapidly say to them I'll go out this evening, but just to let you know I don't drink beer, and they'd be like that's absolutely fine, just have a few alcohol free. We have alcohol free quite often, so just join in and just have alcohol free beer.
Speaker 2:I was okay, and I don't remember what alcohol free beer it would have been back then, but it was various places in Germany, it was Dusseldorf, it was Munich, and I just remember that I had this glass of beer that looked and tasted so much like regular beer. I would insist on going to the bar and seeing it poured, and I'd want full supply chain traceability from it being poured into a glass to to me drinking it. And I wouldn't want, you know, I'd want a hand on it at all times. Because, yeah, this was still kind of so weird for me that that I had this thing that was in a big, tall, beautiful german beer glass. It looked like beer, it smelled like beer, everything about it was like beer, but it had no alcohol in it. So all at once, this was like oh, wow, but also ah, yeah, like whoa, okay, I, this is great, but also this has potential to go wrong, because he just went off to the bar and came back with four glasses.
Speaker 2:They look broadly similar. Yeah, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, so that that that then kind of got me the idea of, wow, okay, german beer, alcohol free. This stuff is incredible. Where do I get it? And, as I said earlier, I was living in france at the time and there was just about, I think, some cronenberg or some african alcohol free in supermarketsmarkets, which I tried, and it really wasn't good.
Speaker 2:So I explored the internet and found, unfortunately, not German companies that were delivered to France, but I found British companies which would deliver to the UK. So I then started buying alcohol-free beer imported by British companies to the UK from Germany that I would have delivered to my parents in the UK. When I drove back to the UK, I would put it in the boot of my car and drive it back to France. I started having probably four or five cases of of german beer about every six months. So it did have to be something that I would ration a little bit, yeah, but I would really enjoy, and it always had like something of a special moment to it when I would be like right, I'm gonna grab one of the the german alcohol frees, I've got a marx and spencer's uh curry on the go beer and curry.
Speaker 2:This is going to be perfect yeah return to my roots evening and you know, wow, that was, yeah, that was that was how I learned to appreciate alcohol free beer. Um, and there was really no, yeah, the link with alcohol had been completely broken by that point. Yes, um, and it was really no, yeah, the link with alcohol had been completely broken by that point, yes, um. And it was more of just kind of a rediscovery that, wow, okay, there's this really good tasting alcohol free beer in germany.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also drink because you enjoy it and not for any other reason and it was already normalized amongst my colleagues in germany because they were already saying um, oh, the alcohol-free beer here we've got lots of it, it's everywhere we go it's got at least one on draft. It's really good. Yeah, I'll have a night on them sometimes because you know I've got life stuff to do, or another time I'll I'll start with one pint of regular beer and then I'll have three alcohol frefree and then I'm okay to drive home. It was just so normal in German beer drinking.
Speaker 2:I think that is really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that is really important, isn't it the kind of acceptance and the inclusion of alcohol-free beer within a community, because when it normalises it kind of it makes it a lot easier to one access it and to feel comfortable drinking it. Um, and I mean, I've noticed it even in the last couple of years in this country, in the uk, it's getting so much better and I hope it continues to grow because, you know, I had a friend recently who was in Germany sending me pictures of their menus and I was like what? Every single beer has a non-alcohol version to go with it, and it's ridiculous, but it's a nice insight into what the world can be like.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. And I found that, exactly as you said, at that same time that I had discovered the wonderful world of alcohol-free beer in Germany, I was also aware that that wasn't how the world was in other places, that the UK was still in the kind of Bex Blue years, as I call them yeah, the dark years, the dark years. France hadn't even got to the Bex Blue years yet. It was still on the kind of Cronenberg Zero and Affligum at the supermarket and nothing in any bars. And it was at that time that, because I was also I've always travelled a lot, but I was traveling all over Europe for for work as well that I was also then getting curious about the alcohol free beer culture in in different places.
Speaker 2:Um, you know where, asking for beer would be met with everything from, you know, concerned disappointment, um, to you, disappointment, to disbelief. And Spain and Portugal, weirdly, were two of the countries which were the most kind of wow, yeah, okay, alcohol-free beer, boom, it's everywhere. So you'd land at the airport and there would be big alcohol-free beer ads all over the place in Lisbon, or you'd see stuff in Madrid for it, and they were like wow, okay, wow, early adopters, we like this, whereas Italy, france, poland, they were holdouts.
Speaker 1:Well, that same friend who I said was in Germany, he was actually in France this weekend and he sent me a picture again of a menu, alcohol-free, and it was Coca-Cola coffee or, weirdly, syrup. Syrup was an alcohol-free option.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, don't forget, one of the classic alcohol-free choices in France has always been a drink called un menthalou, which is mint in water, is mint in water, so it is green mint, peppermint syrup, and typically would be served with Perrier. Oh, okay, so if you order une menthe à l'eau, that would be kind of like fizzy mouthwash. Wow, and that would be one of the classic alcohol-free choices in a French café. That would just be one of the Spoiled. Just one of the classic alcohol-free choices in a French cafe. That would just be one of the choices. And I was in Paris this last weekend and, whilst alcohol-free choices in kind of trendier bars has improved because the whole craft beer thing is kicking off there and there is demand in kind of the traditional brasserie environment, yeah, um, that's still very much. Yeah, you'll get a cronenberg zero if you're lucky, or a heineken zero and be grateful for it, which, yeah, I kind of I am. I don't expect something different.
Speaker 1:Um yeah, you've got to. You come to accept it, don't you? As it as it kind of, as you go through this, this journey? Like you know, if I'm going to watch sport with my dad, I know that the kind of pub that we're going to will give me a bex blue and I, I expect it and I I have to accept it because that's just how it is. Maybe in the next 10 years it will get better, maybe not, but that's just where we are right now. So what was it that made you want to start talking about alcohol-free beer, kind of online, because it's over 1,000 reviews?
Speaker 2:That's right. I think we're at 1,430 published so far and probably more than 100.
Speaker 1:And that's just since Instagram.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's since I started the Instagram, which was a little under three years ago. Prior to sharing them on Instagram, I would take photos of alcohol-free beer that I had in places that I traveled. It's kind of in my own mind. I was like, wow, I'm in Nuremberg in Germany, this alcohol-free beer is incredible. Take a photo of. Wow, I'm in Nuremberg in Germany, this alcohol-free beer is incredible. Take a photo of it. I'm in an airport in Luxembourg. Wow, alcohol-free beer.
Speaker 2:So I already probably had 100 or so beers that I was just filling up my iCloud storage with, and then I had largely moved my life from Paris to Stockholm, okay, which was a big life change. And during the pandemic, I opened a bar and restaurant in Stockholm with some business partners Shout out the old brewer Stockholm, shout out the old brewer stockholm. And one of the things that I do for that that business is, I set up all of the digital marketing, all of the online strategy, all of the social media, which meant I was doing loads of stuff on insta, yeah, um, and, to be honest, I wanted a way of doing live fire exercises with a working instagram account where I could play around with stuff and not have it damage the business that I'd invested in. So I figured right, I've got 100 pictures of alcohol-free beer lined up. I'll just share them and for anyone who wants a finger-scrolling RSI, they can go right to the bottom of my uh instagram and you can see that the first maybe hundred page pictures I shared were all slightly more exotic locations of okay, of beer and bottles of beer and glasses of beer. Um, so to start with, it was literally kind of sharing those and I got quite a good reaction and discovered that there was some other people who were doing similar things. So my thought was okay, not a lot of point doing the same thing that other people are doing.
Speaker 2:However, at that exact moment in my life, I was kind of living in three countries. So I was living in France, I was living in sweden, I was living in the uk and I was aware that in sweden and in the uk there were people who were running alcohol-free beer accounts. Um, in france there weren't, but what there wasn't really was anyone who was kind of leveraging, being in lots of different places and getting beer from lots of different places and kind of trying to join it all together. So my lofty ambition from the start was really kind of okay.
Speaker 2:There are brilliant alcohol-free beers in sweden which nobody in the rest of the world is caring about, because the swedes don't seem to want to shout about how great their beer is. Yeah, um, you know, there are small breweries in the uk making great alcohol-free beer and nobody's really shouting about them. All the all the while there is very bad alcohol-free beer in the world that people who want to try alcohol-free beer are leaning over the bar and going, um, yeah, that one down there. Oh, the becks blue's Blue. Yeah, yeah, sure I'll have one of them.
Speaker 2:And there's people trying that and going, oh, I was all excited about alcohol-free beer, but Never again. No, I'll kind of not bother. So part of the wanting to stand up to the little guy in me was, like you know what, if someone is making brilliant alcohol-free beer, people should be aware of it, because if they are, then they might try and get that alcohol-free beer. But equally, even if they can't get that one, they're going to be a bit more demanding or a bit more curious about what other stuff is out there and that might in some way lead to less sales of Bex Blue and more sales of just stuff that's better made and tastes better and has a bit of heart and soul behind it yeah, I think that that's an important thing, isn't it?
Speaker 1:because you know, when big alcohol release a beer, that is bad. It's most people's first kind of journey into alcohol free and it potentially ruins it for so many people. And that can be dangerous because if you've got someone like myself that had to stop drinking but I don't think I could have stopped drinking without alcohol-free beer personally if all that existed was Heineken, I'd have been in real trouble.
Speaker 2:Was Heineken, I'd have been in real trouble. I discovered so much about the world of beer through the wrong choice of word, but through the optics of alcohol-free beer, because I missed the whole craft beer thing. I left the UK at the beginning of 2001 to go and live in france. So the kind of craft beer revolution that saw neck oil on every bar top and weird ipas everywhere, that that that wasn't my life. I I missed that and it hadn't come to france at the time that I was still drinking. So I was still very much a Guinness in winter, corona in summer Right, okay, real ale sometimes when I was back in the UK, because if a place had Timmy Taylor's or something, I'd be like, yep, that's a great pint, I like that. But the whole craft beer thing, the whole varietal hop side of things, the crazy styles, that was a world I knew nothing about, like literally nothing. So I have discovered that only through the world of alcohol-free beer.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting because I mean reading your posts. They are and I don't mean this to sound kind of dismissive, but they are proper reviews. You know what you're talking about and you know your palates and all of this, and it's a very educated take on a beer. It's just that the beers that you talk about don't have alcohol in them and I think it's really great to see someone take it seriously. And I don't mean that to sound detrimental to to anybody or to the industry at all, but when you see people take this stuff as seriously as alcoholic beer, I think that's really really special that's.
Speaker 2:That's really nice of you to say that. I'm really happy that you noticed and it is it's my approach to lots of things. I'm sure my therapist could could fill you in on a lot more details, but it it it has always been my way that if I become passionate about a subject, then then I kind of want to go quite deeply into a subject. So with alcohol-free beer, I suddenly became very aware of the fact that I didn't know a lot about the craft beer world. I didn't actually know that much about beer, to tell the truth, I didn't really know much about it at all. So I very quickly started to just educate myself by reading handbooks on beer and books about the history of beer and learning a bit more. And then it was just a case really of kind of learning by doing.
Speaker 2:And I apply a method when I, when I taste beers, you will have noticed that reviews tend to follow a similar kind of fairly classic tasting format. As far as I could tell, I would watch some beer judging online where um Cicerone, certified judges would you know, taste array of Belgian beers and they would describe them in a certain way. So I thought to myself okay, that that that's clearly how. You know that's how beer reviewing is done. You know I'll apply similar sorts of vocabulary, I will apply similar words to describe color, but at the same time I don't want to make it kind of too dull and analytical, because I want to make it a little bit interesting for the reader. But also I never want it to be just about me and what I think about about beer, because I'm not the, I'm not really the entertainment here, I'm the, I'm the vessel for telling people about this stuff yes, that's a perfect way to put it like.
Speaker 1:If I want to know what a beer is like and what you know what to expect from a beer, it's always your page, for I'll go to.
Speaker 2:There are people who've people get in touch all the time and I always love it when they do. But there's people who get in touch and there's a beer that that I haven't scored especially highly but they said to me. They said I feel like I know your taste and you described that beer in such a way I had to get it and it's exactly what I thought. I really, really love it, and it was a beer that that, while I was indifferent on but I didn't I didn't rave about because I've said to anyone I'll ever listen the beers that I might hand out a gold award or rave about. It's very subjective. Yeah, of course, and particularly some of the the highest scoring ones ever, that there are some fairly odd choices in there, but that I think they're very, very well made beers from a technical point of view. Yeah, it's just. They also happen to just tick my get slightly obsessive about things box and I just adore how they taste.
Speaker 1:Are there any I mean there's hundreds but any specific breweries or brands that you really enjoy and that really kind of made you think, oh, this is very, very good.
Speaker 2:That's another great question and I obviously could reply with thousands, but I'll spare you and give it a quick list down to to three. First one would be the very wonderful german beer where it all started for me, which would be meisels vice. Yes, and meisels vice is a wheat beer that is just, it's sublime, it's just absolutely delicious. Fortunately, it is one of those beers that is just so damn good that it's available almost everywhere in the world. And hallelujah, it deserves to be, because that was the one that I was transporting in the boot of my car backwards and forwards from the UK to France. So big shout out for Meusel's Weiss.
Speaker 2:I would also give a big shout out to Mashgang, because I said I wasn't a particular craft beer head before discovering alcohol-free beer. So a lot of kind of my discovery in craft beer has coincided with with Mashgang's arrival as a, as a brand, and I've always loved the way that they've grown up in public, they've made mistakes in public, they've survived things blowing up, things not working, and they've lived all that and they've owned up to it and it's been, it's just been really refreshing to, to, to see um. So I definitely shout out them because also they keep me entertained, um I just released so many, so many crazy new ideas that it's just it's just entertaining to follow them.
Speaker 2:And and finally, I'd shout out a local uh to where my dad lives. Uh, brewery from sussex called Only With Love, um, who makes some absolute bangers, particularly their, their juicy AF uh range, which is just it's just so good the way. Just a little bit of fruit juice into a kind of pithy IPA just really just sets off the bitterness, the fruitiness, everything in it and it's just, it just works really well. So big shout out to Only Good Love as well.
Speaker 1:What I respect about you more than most people within the sober community is your willingness to defend some kind of brands that people might attack. So Carlsberg is an example. I've been very vocal about my hatred for Carlsberg and it was actually you that came up and said actually there's a bit of a story to Carlsberg. So what is that story?
Speaker 2:There does seem to be a Carlsberg story and I would say that a Carlsberg story and I would say that the Carlsberg story is that the Carlsberg alcohol-free beers are very different around the world. So I live in Sweden now. I see Carlsberg alcohol-free beer all the time and it's been one of my. Like you know what have they got? Oh, carlsberg alcohol-free. That's fine. It's just a damn good lager, it's fine. And yet I was, I was aware through uk pages I I followed through yours, through other ones that carlsberg has this, this, this bad rep in the uk, yeah, and I was like, well, there's a bit's, a bit of a disconnect here. And I did try some Carlsberg in the UK. I tried some Carlsberg from Canada, I tried some Carlsberg Nordic from Germany and it became very clear to me that actually there were, or here was, a company that wasn't trying to make exactly the same product in different companies, which interbrow do with abm, bev do with stella but this was carlsberg, just putting different products into different markets with different recipes, but, broadly speaking, the same name. So you guys in the uk get carlsberg 0.0 yeah, which it's not great. Even I will admit that, if that's what I base my Carlsberg opinion on. It's not great.
Speaker 2:But the Carlsberg 0.0 we get in Sweden is Carlsberg Hoppy Lager 0.0, which is a new beer released last year, badged as being extra hoppy, extra flavoursome, light and delicious, and it's great. It's really, really good. It's a touch lighter than their pilsner but it's got an extra blast of kind of dry hop on the nose. It's just, it's just floral, it's fragrant, it's fun, it's nice. The regular karlsberg, the 0.5 alcohol free nordic pilsner, it's just a good semi-bitter, almost like german style pearls. That's just, it's just nice, it's just a really good go-to beer. Um, and I do think that that's interesting strategy from carlsberg that there are these regional variations when, as I said earlier, with imbev, with with stellar artois, they they tried as close as they can make that identical everywhere in the world. So yeah, everyone can dislike the beer just as much yeah it was.
Speaker 1:it was when you told me that it blew my mind because it I mean I don't know why, I would never assume that it was. It wasn't different in different countries. But carlsberg I you know it is for snobbing me I was like it's horrible and I drank it and yeah it was horrible. But to see a page that will actually defend these breweries or these institutions, I think it's just a great thing that you know you won't just say that something is bad because of the brand, and I think that's really important to give everyone a nice I don't even know what the word is but to treat everyone equally and judge the liquid and nothing more.
Speaker 2:I'm a good Swede in that respect. We were famed for our neutrality until a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the AFNA. What is that?
Speaker 2:This seems to be a recent thing and someone might listen to this and tell me that I'm talking absolute bobbins when it comes to this. But it is a. In the UK and associated territories, australia. Alcohol free is abbreviated online to kind of AF. So you talk about AF beer, af beer club In the US, af beer club In the US, na is used. Yeah, so in the UK it's all. In the US it's all NA. The AFNA seems to be led by some places in the US who are attempting to kind of create a catch-all term to describe A alcohol-free, non-alcohol beer internationally but also in the US. The fact that there is some nomenclature and state-by-state definition around no alcohol versus low alcohol versus alcohol-free, much like the kind of muddle the UK gets into. So in the US describing stuff broadly under an umbrella term of AFNA does seem to be kind of a slightly elegant workaround for them as well. But it's a term that I've seen most used um by an organization called um. It's like aficionados, but the af part and the na part of capitalized?
Speaker 2:yeah, and that is an organization in the us, um, which is an alcohol-free beer knowledge and appreciation organization which runs its own certifications, its own exams um which resemble to a lot of extent the cicerone uh tasting program, but that is open to people who drink alcohol-free beer. Because I've, I've done the first level of the cicerone um examinations, which are for beer drinkers, real beer drinkers, but I I can't go any further than level one because, right, I physically won't drink beer. Put it in my mouth, taste it, whether I spit it out or not. I don't want to drink alcoholic beer just so I can pass an exam. Yes, and I can't pass their exams if I do it with alcohol free um, because they've never got that far um, but with aficionados um.
Speaker 2:It's only available in the us at the moment, or it is available if you're exceptionally stubborn and insist on finding ways to work out how an amazon kindle account from the us can be kind of made to work if you get a temporary portable sms number that will work for five minutes, just long enough to validate an account, etc. Etc. So they told me it wasn't available outside of the US. Red rag to a bull it is. I got it and I passed it and it's really fascinating because it goes into so much detail about alcohol-free beer, from serving to manufacture to safety considerations, to challenges of serving it on draft, all sorts of things. It's a really fascinating thing to do.
Speaker 1:So just more credibility to the industry, which is only a good thing.
Speaker 2:It's great the way the US picks up stuff like this, gets really enthusiastic about stuff really, really quickly, and you only have to look at the number of alcohol-free dry bottle shops in the US and the way that that's been expanding and that's been just, yeah, that's been incredible. It's just, you know, it's crazy the speed that the, that bandwagon has has has built up in the us.
Speaker 1:What do you think that the industry will look like in the next five years? What do you think will happen and what do you want to happen?
Speaker 2:wow, what a good question.
Speaker 2:Um, if, if I knew all the answers to those, I think I'd be a very, potentially a very rich man.
Speaker 2:What I want to see happen is I want to see beer markets all over the world start to look more like germany and you start to get alcohol-free beer just on bar tops. Um, in a place where people just walk in, scan the top of the bar and go yeah, I'll have two pints of Guinness, I'll have a Guinness Ciro and I'll have a stoop, and it's like right, okay, great, and it takes no more thought than that and you've not had to ask someone. Excuse me, I'm a bit strange. Do you have an alcohol-free beer? Could you bend down, open up the fridge door, look blankly at the things on the bottom shelf, please, and then not be sure what they are, whilst I annoy other people asking you to turn them around? Is that okay? Because things like that are really I don't care, but to someone who might be their first pub trip in a while, they might want to be drinking an alcohol-free beer on that visit to the bar for the first time. It's a hell of a lot easier early on.
Speaker 1:For me that was a trigger. Early on, kind of asking for the alcohol-free option. It was really horrible. Um, now I kind of embrace it and I quite enjoy it. Um, because if someone will turn around to say x blue, I get a kick out of being like oh no, I'm better than that, thank you. But early on it was. It was really triggering.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it can be triggering when someone you know, they turn around and they grab you and say, oh, I'll have the Wiper True, and they'll grab a Wiper True out of the fridge, bring it over and Wiper True. They make a couple of great alcohol-free beers but their branding is almost identical, from alcohol free to with alcohol, and someone grabs the wrong one out the fridge and then they flip it open. You're like, oh no, sorry, that's the, that's the with alcohol. Yeah, one or yeah that. The world I want to see is just where it's just really easy for people to get a good alcohol free drink and for the experience of ordering it to be as normal and painless as possible, for them to feel okay about it and for the people around them to also just kind of be okay with the fact that someone is having a not alcoholic drink on that particular occasion. So what it's? It's the type of beer like it, like every other one. It just doesn't have the inconvenience of alcohol do you think we're getting there?
Speaker 1:it's a difficult one, isn't it? Because when you're so intertwined within that world it feels like we really are progressing. But then all it takes is one conversation with I don't know let's call him gary down the pub to go. Oh, actually we're a little bit further away than I thought we were here I think that the consumer behavior is going to drive a lot of uptake.
Speaker 2:So when the consumers are really asking for stuff and driving sales and fridges are emptying faster of some really good drinks, because for a lot of pubs who've only ever stopped bad alcohol-free beer, that's a vicious circle because they've never really seen what happens when they stock something that's so good that it has people going, wow, okay, I'll have another one of those. That has never really trickled through to people and I think consumer behavior is going to drive that. That's for sure. But like anything, there's going to be holdouts. There's going to be people who don't like change. There are going to be people who are suspicious that somehow non-drinkers don't spend as much money as drinkers. Or and that's a line I've heard that from people close to me in the industry who say that you know, you know those alcohol-free types all very well, but they don't spend like proper customers.
Speaker 1:Give us good options and you watch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, watch how we come in, drink two or three of those, have a meal. Bring a friend with us. Bring other people back on another occasion.
Speaker 1:That's the thing, isn't it? Because I'm sure I keep some pubs by me in business Because if they do a good alcohol-free option, I'm going to go back there Because, shock horror, I want to go to pubs, because I really enjoy going to the pub. So if you give me something that I want to drink, I'll come back far more often than I probably would have done when I was drinking alcohol, because I can get alcohol anywhere that's so true, and there are.
Speaker 2:There are places which are already yeah, they're already discovering that, but there are quite. There are close networks within the license trade. People talk to people. There isn't necessarily the same kind of with the exception of guinness zero, there's not. There's not the the breakthrough product. It's not suddenly like you've got Madry being launched so all of a sudden it's in 1,000 bars in Britain in a week, because it's got the whole power of a massive brewery behind it. Guinness is the only one that's got the power to do that and the challenge Guinness faces is that it's actually really complex to make Guininness zero right. It's an expensive industrial process. They've been retooling their factory in in dublin to be able to make more of it. Um, but already they are selling such massive volumes of it in ireland that they have to kind of cool down the rollout a little bit because they're not. They're not ready to. You know, they're not. Literally they are not ready to have as much demand as there would be currently if they went at it full tilt that's interesting.
Speaker 1:That's very interesting. Um, last question for you somebody that was just starting to dip their toe into the world of alcohol free, be it because of sobriety or because they're taking a break or any reason what advice would you give them?
Speaker 2:my advice would would be do things your way. Do things that you enjoy in a way that you enjoy doing, and listen to yourself more than other people. So if you enjoy doing something or you're enjoying how something is making you feel either because it's different or you're curious about what that feeling is have the courage to follow that yourself and see where it goes. Because you said at the start of this conversation, there are lots of different sobriety journeys out there and I personally think that a lot of people's sobriety journeys can be of different lengths.
Speaker 2:I think there are going to be sobriety mini breaks that people are comfortable taking, or people are going to take sobriety longer breaks, or it's going to be something that becomes so widespread that a catch-all term of sobriety is something that describes a state that applies to so many people. It's going to become a meaningless term, not because there's any shade being thrown at people who are struggling, but simply because the idea of going without alcohol is going to become so normalized that it's just something that people integrate into their day-to-day, their week-to-week, their month-to-month, their year-to-year. Whatever it might be, there's going to be no need to discuss it in these terms. It's just going to be something that that that helps people have a better relationship with alcohol. Um, and as I've said before, I should probably copyright this, but people should if they do consume alcohol.
Speaker 1:People should be enjoying alcohol more and not enjoying more alcohol wow, yes, yeah, that's perfect, um, and I think you're right that you know not everybody that is choosing to be sober for whatever period of time has the disease of alcoholism, and that's not to take away from anybody. I mean alcoholic sat right here talking to you currently. But I'm aware that not everybody that isn't drinking is an alcoholic, and not everybody that talks about alcohol-free beer is an alcoholic, and not everybody that talks about alcohol-free beer is an alcoholic. And that's the world I want to live in, because then, by me having to make the choice to not drink, it kills the stigma and that would be a wonderful world to live in.
Speaker 1:Martin, thank you so much for coming to talk to me. I really was keen on getting you on because, as I said early days, for me finding your profile, it was like, yep, okay, look at what this guy's doing, I can live like that. And well, I've done it. So thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to come and chat to me you're welcome, total pleasure thank you for listening to this week's episode of the sober bo Boozers Club podcast.
Speaker 1:My name is Ben Gibbs. You can find me online at Sober Boozers Club. You can find Martin at Alcohol Free World, and you're going to be absolutely blown away by the range of alcohol free beers on that page. I know I was when I stopped drinking, so get on there, have a look at some beers, pick your favourites, order them and enjoy yourself. Thank you again for listening. I'll catch you very, very soon.