Non-Alcoholic Beer in New York: What to Buy and Where to Find It

Last reviewed: July 2026

Non-alcoholic beer used to be a punchline, and the punchline was earned. O'Doul's and its contemporaries were made by taking finished beer and boiling the alcohol out of it, which also removed most of what made it taste like anything. For thirty years the category sat on the bottom shelf and nobody defended it.

That changed in the last several years, mostly because brewers stopped treating it as a consolation product. Athletic Brewing, which makes nothing but non-alcoholic beer, is now among the largest craft brewers in the United States by volume, which would have been an absurd sentence in 2015. Their Run Wild IPA took gold at the 2025 Best of Craft Beer Awards, competing on flavor rather than in a separate category for the abstemious.

What the numbers on the can mean

In the United States, anything under 0.5 percent alcohol by volume can be sold as non-alcoholic. That is the legal line, and most of the good stuff sits just under it.

A can marked 0.0 is a different claim. Those are brewed or filtered to effectively nothing, though trace amounts remain the way they do in bread, ripe fruit and kombucha. Guinness 0 and Heineken 0.0 are both in this group.

The 0.5 figure sounds alarming to some people and is worth putting in context: orange juice that has been sitting out, a ripe banana and a slice of rye bread all land in roughly the same territory. You cannot drink enough non-alcoholic beer to become intoxicated, because your body processes it faster than you can physically consume it. Whether that settles the question for you is a separate matter, and the last section of this page deals with it.

What is actually worth buying

Athletic Brewing is the default recommendation and deserves to be. Run Wild is the IPA and the one that converted most skeptics. Upside Dawn, their golden ale, is the better choice if IPAs are not your thing. They are widely stocked across New York and the range rotates seasonally.

Guinness 0 is the strangest success of the category, because stout should be the hardest style to pull off without alcohol and instead it is the easiest. It is made from the same ingredients as ordinary Guinness with the alcohol removed by cold filtration. Side by side with the real thing it reads as thinner, but on its own, cold, in a pub, most people would not question it. It is also the one you are most likely to find on draught, including at a few places in Albany.

Heineken 0.0 is the light lager benchmark. In blind tastings it has repeatedly come out indistinguishable from regular Heineken, which says something about Heineken as much as about the 0.0, but it means you can order one anywhere and know what you are getting.

Beyond those, the German brewers have been doing this longest and best. Bitburger Drive, Erdinger's alkoholfrei wheat beer and Clausthaler have been on the market for decades and are treated in Germany as sports drinks rather than as substitutes, which is a genuinely different relationship to the product.

Where to buy it in New York

New York's alcohol laws split retail in a way that works in your favor here. Wine and spirits are sold only in liquor stores, but beer is sold in grocery stores and convenience stores, and non-alcoholic beer is not legally alcohol at all. It goes wherever the shop decides to put it.

In practice that means the large supermarkets carry it. The bigger Hannaford and Price Chopper stores in the Capital Region keep a reasonable spread, usually in the beer aisle rather than somewhere separate, and Athletic's core range turns up in most of them. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's both carry a selection in the parts of the state where they exist. Wegmans is the best of the supermarkets on this if you are near one.

Liquor stores are the wrong place to look, since many will not stock a product they cannot sell under their license. The exception is the larger independent bottle shops and Total Wine, which carry the non-alcoholic spirits and wines that supermarkets do not.

Online is the fallback for anything specific. Athletic ships direct, and the specialist retailers that have grown up around this category will send a mixed case anywhere in the state, which is the cheapest way to work out what you like before committing to a six-pack of something.

Two practical notes

Non-alcoholic beer does not keep as well as the ordinary kind, because alcohol is a preservative and taking it out leaves a less stable product. Check the date, buy it from somewhere with turnover, and drink it within a few months rather than leaving a can in the back of the fridge until Christmas.

Serve it properly cold and in a glass. This sounds like fussiness and it is not: the flavor gap between these beers and their alcoholic versions narrows considerably when the beer is cold, and drinking from a glass rather than a can changes the experience more than seems reasonable.

The argument about drinking this in recovery

This is where an honest page has to stop reviewing products.

Opinion inside recovery communities is genuinely divided, and anyone who tells you the question is settled is telling you about themselves rather than about the evidence. A.A. as an organization has no position, because it has no positions on outside issues. What you get instead is a lot of members with strong personal views.

The case against is straightforward. The point of a non-alcoholic beer is to taste like beer, and for someone whose drinking was triggered by the taste, the smell, the shape of the glass or the ritual of the evening, that is a rehearsal rather than a substitute. Plenty of people have relapsed starting from exactly there and will tell you so at length. There is also the practical problem that nobody in a bar can tell what is in your glass, including you if someone else brings it over.

The case for is that a lot of people drank because everyone around them was drinking and holding a can made the evening survivable. For them, having something in hand at a wedding or a work event removes a difficulty rather than creating one, and years pass without incident.

What most people who have been sober a long time seem to land on is that timing matters more than principle. In the first months, when the habit is still physical and everything is raw, most would say leave it alone. Later, when you are not white-knuckling it, the question becomes a personal calculation rather than a risk. If you are in a program, this is a good thing to raise with a sponsor or in a meeting rather than to decide alone in a supermarket aisle, because the people who know your drinking will have a better read on it than any article can.

If you are not in recovery and simply drinking less, none of the above applies to you and the worst outcome is that you waste eleven dollars on a six-pack you do not like.