Schlafly Non-Alcoholic Pale Ale Review

Every January, the inboxes of drink writers flood with the inevitable inundation of non-alcoholic pitches for Dry January, which tend to get more outlandish and impractical on a yearly basis. But there are still the occasional ones that make me perk up, particularly when a venerable craft brewery makes its first entry into the non-alcoholic beer world. I’m likewise a little bit more inherently curious if that beer in question is one that runs counter to the prevailing sentiment in the industry, and it’s safe to say that Schlafly’s new non-alcoholic take on their flagship Pale Ale qualifies on that front.

To start with, this just isn’t a beer style where you’re often seeing any non-alcoholic variant, certainly not in 2024. Schlafly Pale Ale is practically a living fossil in the modern beer world, a malt-forward English pale ale supported by lightly floral and herbal English hops. This style of beer can barely be said to still exist at all in the American market even in its full-ABV form, not when the rank and file craft beer drinker is looking to cram as much sugar-laden, fruit-infused IPA down their gullet as possible. In non-alcoholic form? I can’t really think of a single comparable product.

“Pale Ale was the beer that started it all for us back in 1991, so it only made sense to offer a non-alcoholic option for a brew that’s familiar and still resonates with our core consumers today,” said CEO David Schlafly in a statement. “Our customers have come to expect quality, classic styles from our beers, and we’re putting that same dedication to our non-alc category.”

So too does the company reportedly rely on an atypical method for brewing their NA pale ale, though it doesn’t reveal exactly what that process entails. Many modern NA craft beers are made via dealcoholization, the gentle removal of alcohol post-fermentation. Brewers at Schlafly, on the other hand, believe that process “strips away some flavor compounds alongside alcohol” and are instead using a brewing process that does not involve dealcoholization. Presumably, this means they’re using something like arrested fermentation to conduct a short fermentation process leaving the final figure less than .5% ABV, or potentially some new proprietary process. The latter would be nothing new for the wild west that is the non-alcoholic beer market, where quality control inconsistency and a wide array of pasteurization methods revolving around unknown “proprietary techniques” have become a common theme, and one of the segment’s biggest challenges.