Fremont Brewing Non-Alcoholic IPA
Photos via Fremont Brewing
As recently as a few years ago, I probably would have asserted that India pale ale was one of the most difficult craft beer styles to replicate in non-alcoholic form. For years, I had tasted various attempts at NA IPA, only to find that far too many of them were either full of cloying malt sweetness—that particular, unfermented, “worty” flavor that so many NA beers can have—or out of whack in their hop profiles, ranging from “soapy” to unconvincingly artificial in their fruitiness. But in the last few years, craft breweries producing non-alcoholic beer styles have clearly solved some pieces of the puzzle, and they average quality of these beers began to rapidly improve. Today, I would no longer categorize quality NA IPA as one of the harder styles to find or execute, thanks to quality entries from many breweries, ranging from the likes of Flying Dog to Crux Fermentation Project.
Still, I do tend to look at new NA beer brands with at least a little skepticism in most cases, as I’m wary of inexperienced breweries trying to jump aboard the NA bandwagon. That caution can be dispensed with, however, when the brewery in question was one we named as the #3 best American brewery of the 2010s, ‘ala Seattle’s Fremont Brewing. After long being a superstar across many categories in Paste’s series of blind tastings, including impressive feats like producing our #1 barrel-aged imperial stout out of 144 entries, Fremont has turned its gaze toward the NA beer world. And wouldn’t you know it, they’ve gone and produced arguably the best overall NA IPA that I’ve sampled to date. I honestly wouldn’t have expected anything else.
The simply named Fremont Non-Alcoholic IPA is a new offering, brewed with a relatively simple grist of 2-Row Pale and Carapils malt, with Citra and Citra Cryo hops. That’s a pretty stock-standard recipe, and yet Fremont manages to get the absolute best out of it. Note: This is a traditional non-alcoholic beer, meaning that it does contain some small amount of alcohol, less than .5% ABV.
With that said, let’s get to tasting this one.