What does “no and low” mean?
Great question! It’s a term that gets thrown about but what does it actually mean?
No and low refers to drinks that contain either no alcohol or a reduced amount of alcohol compared to their traditional counterparts - think a 2% beer rather than a 5% beer. As more and more people look to moderate their drinking, the drinks world has responded with products that fit. Seedlip is widely regarded as the brand that kickstarted the whole thing but there’s now dozens of no and low spirits, wines, beers, ciders and everything else you could think of (we know because we try them every day and stock the best ones).
Where it gets complicated is that a lot of “non-alcoholic” beers or wines actually contain trace alcohol, always less than 0.5% ABV. We’re not going to go into the legal detail because, well, it’s so fiddly but the key take-away is there is a subtle difference between “non-alcoholic” (usually <0.5% ABV) and “alcohol-free” (0% ABV). Then there’s the world of “low alcohol”, which is very flexible because it depends what it’s a low alcohol version of.
Still with us? Excellent.
Interestingly, many everyday foods and beverages contain trace amounts of alcohol, albeit in very small quantities. For example, orange juice naturally contains a small amount of alcohol due to the fermentation process that occurs as the fruit ripens. Similarly, soy sauce contains alcohol as a byproduct of the fermentation of soybeans and wheat. So, next time you pick up a meal deal, just think that your bottle of orange juice may well contain more alcohol than one of our delicious alcohol-free beers!
If you want to put into context how much alcohol is in a non-alc beer… at 0.5% ABV, you would need to drink eight of them to have the equivalent alcohol of a single shot of 40% vodka. That doesn’t take into account that the time it would take you to drink those eight beers, you would probably have processed most of the alcohol anyway. If you want to down eight beers for an experiment then you crack on but we definitely don’t encourage it.
Want to know more about the process the drinks go through to become non-alcoholic? We’re working on a blog post right now on this very thing! Stay tuned…