Alcohol information
How BeerHQ handles alcohol
BeerHQ explains what is in beer and how it is made. It is written for adults, it makes no health claims in either direction, and there are questions it does not answer on purpose.
Why BeerHQ asks whether you are 18 or over
BeerHQ is about alcoholic drinks, so it asks you to confirm you are 18 or over before it shows you the site. That is BeerHQ’s own rule about who its content is for. It is not a claim that every country requires an age gate on an informational website about beer, and it is not the same as any local legal purchase age — those differ, and several are not 18.
It is a question, not a check. Nothing here can verify what you answer, and asking for a date of birth would collect personal data in exchange for an assurance BeerHQ still would not have. So it asks once and stores the answer.
BeerHQ asks whether you are 18 or over and stores your answer in your browser's local storage under the key "beerhq.age-confirmation". The stored value is the answer itself and the date you gave it — nothing else. No date of birth, name or identifier is collected, the value is never sent to a server, and it is not used for analytics or advertising. It is kept for 365 days, after which BeerHQ asks again. Clearing site data for BeerHQ removes it.
Answering that question is not permission to track you. BeerHQ runs no analytics at all at present; if that changes it will be a separate decision, asked separately. See cookies and local storage.
“Alcohol-free” is not one number
This is the single most common error in writing about no- and low-alcohol beer, and it is invisible because the sentence always reads correctly. “Alcohol-free means 0.5%” is right across much of Europe. In long-standing United Kingdom guidance the same phrase means 0.05% — ten times stricter — and a 0.5% beer is de-alcoholised instead. In the United States, “alcohol-free” requires 0.0% and the sub-0.5% term is non-alcoholic.
The consequence is practical rather than academic: the same physical beer can be labelled three different ways in three markets, and a shopper comparing two cans is often comparing two labelling regimes rather than two beers.
Where each descriptor sits on the ABV scale. The same words mark different points in different countries, which is why BeerHQ names the country every time it states one.
- Germany: “zero-point-zero (“0,0 %”)” means exactly 0.0% ABV, as convention.
- United States: “alcohol-free” means exactly 0.0% ABV, as statutory.
- United Kingdom: “alcohol-free” means up to and including 0.05% ABV, as guidance.
- Germany: “alcohol-free (“alkoholfrei”)” means up to and including 0.5% ABV, as convention.
- United Kingdom: “de-alcoholised” means up to and including 0.5% ABV, as guidance.
- United States: “non-alcoholic” means up to and including 0.5% ABV, as statutory.
- Spain: “non-alcoholic (“sin alcohol”)” means up to and including 1% ABV, as convention.
- United Kingdom: “low-alcohol” means up to and including 1.2% ABV, as guidance.
BeerHQ records 4 jurisdictions with labelling terms and 11 with a defined standard drink, each with the date it was last checked. The most recent check was 2026-08-15. Rules change, and the United Kingdom has consulted on moving its threshold; treat anything older than a year as unverified rather than as current.
What ABV tells you, and what it does not
| ABV is a proportion, not a dose | Alcohol by volume describes the drink. How much alcohol you have had depends on the serving size as well, which is why a 330 ml bottle at 5% and a pint at 3.8% are closer than the numbers suggest. |
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| Units and standard drinks do not travel | A United Kingdom unit is 7.9 g of ethanol, an Australian standard drink 10 g, an American standard drink 14 g. Guidance written in one of them means something different read in another. |
| The number on the label has a tolerance | Declared strength is permitted to differ from measured strength within limits set locally, and recipes are reformulated without announcement. BeerHQ dates every strength it publishes and records whether the figure came from the producer or from consistent trade reporting. |
| Strength is not quality, and it is not a target | BeerHQ compares strengths as part of describing what a beer is like to drink. It does not rank beers by alcohol per unit cost, and it does not treat a higher figure as a better one. |
A “0.0” on the can is a brand name
Products marketed as 0.0 are frequently very low in alcohol, and some are genuinely at zero. But the digits on the front of a can are marketing copy, and BeerHQ treats them as such: what it records is the published strength, the date that figure was checked, and where the figure came from. It does not convert a brand name into a measurement, and it does not assume a 0.0 product satisfies the strictest descriptor in every market it is sold in.
It also matters how a beer reached that strength, and the two routes are not interchangeable. BeerHQ records which one applies to each product it carries, including where it has not been able to establish the answer — producers are frequently vague about this, and inferring it from the taste is not something BeerHQ publishes.
Alcohol removed
- Ferment the beer normally, to full strength.
- Take the ethanol out — vacuum distillation, reverse osmosis or filtration. Reduced pressure lets it boil off cool, which is what stops the beer tasting cooked.
- What it costs: body, and the volatile aroma the alcohol was carrying. Bitterness and roast survive, which is why a pils or a stout takes this route better than a hazy IPA does.
Brewed to strength
- Start from a very low gravity, or use a yeast that will not attenuate.
- Stop fermentation early, or never let it get going. The alcohol is never made, so nothing has to be taken out.
- What it costs: body again, but for a different reason — there was never much there. Aroma is intact, and an arrested fermentation leaves unfermented wort sugar behind, which is the worty sweetness the category is known for.
The same restraint applies to the relationship between an alcohol-free beer and the beer it takes its name from. Where BeerHQ records that a beer is the alcohol-free counterpart of another, that records lineage and branding. It does not assert the same recipe, the same process, the same ingredients or the same taste, and it never says “the same beer without the alcohol”. Removing alcohol removes body and part of what carries aroma; that is a real difference, and it is the difference the category markets hardest against.
People avoid alcohol for medical, religious and personal reasons that BeerHQ knows nothing about. Where a reader states they want no alcohol, BeerHQ treats that as a hard constraint on what it will show rather than as a preference to be scored — but the labelling above is the thing to check on the product itself, not here.
Questions BeerHQ does not answer
A few questions have real search demand and no safe answer, so BeerHQ registers them, records why they are held, and does not answer them anywhere — not on a page, not through search, not through a calculator, and not by rephrasing.
| Getting drunk faster | "Strongest beer for the money", "fastest way to get drunk" and similar framings target harm directly. What BeerHQ does instead: Factual strength comparison presented as flavour and drinkability information, with units shown. |
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| Drink-drive estimation | Any tool that answers "how much can I drink and still drive?" implies a safe quantity. Individual alcohol elimination varies enough that no calculator can support that inference, and being wrong once is catastrophic. What BeerHQ does instead: A units calculator that reports consumption already taken, explicitly refuses to comment on fitness to drive, and states that limits are enforced on measured blood or breath alcohol. |
| Sobriety or BAC estimation | Blood-alcohol and "am I sober yet" estimators fail unpredictably across body composition, food, medication and individual metabolism, and are used precisely when judgement is impaired. What BeerHQ does instead: Report units or standard drinks consumed as a factual record, with no inference about impairment. |
Drink-drive limits are the clearest case. They differ between countries and even within the United Kingdom, they are enforced on measured blood or breath alcohol rather than on a count of drinks, and how quickly a person processes alcohol varies with body composition, food, medication and other factors no calculator can see. An answer to “how many can I have and still drive” would imply a safe quantity, and being wrong once is catastrophic.
7 purposes are refused in total; the rest cover drinking games, consumption maximisation, framing alcohol as a treatment, and content aimed at people below the local purchase age. The list is enforced in code and tested, not kept in a document.
Health
BeerHQ makes no health claim about beer, alcohol-free beer, or alcohol, in either direction. It has no health-evidence programme, so any such claim would be unsupportable by construction — including the flattering ones the drinks industry likes.
Where composition is relevant it is described as composition: what a calorie in beer comes from, what is left behind when fermentation is stopped early, what is in the ingredients. Questions about alcohol and pregnancy, medication or a specific medical condition are for a clinician who knows the person asking, and BeerHQ does not attempt them.
How current any of this is
Beer is a moving target. Breweries are bought and closed, recipes are reformulated, strengths are adjusted quietly, and products are withdrawn from one market while continuing in another. BeerHQ carries a deliberately small set of reference beers rather than a catalogue of everything, precisely so that what it does carry can be kept honest.
Every reference beer records whether it is in current production, how quickly its facts are expected to go stale, and when its strength was last checked. A beer that is no longer made stays on the site where it explains something, and is not offered as something to go and buy.
If something here is wrong, it is worth telling BeerHQ — see corrections.