The doping agent of the Germans. This is roughly what the headlines sounded like in 2018. At the Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, the German team had excelled in sport, after all 31 medals were recorded in the end. So the world was still wondering during the games what the secret was behind the enormous achievements. And the New York Times provided a possible answer: “German Olympians drink a lot of non-alcoholic beer – and win a lot of gold.”
In fact, the German Olympians in South Korea were often seen with alcohol-free drinks. A brewery had delivered a supply of 3,500 bottles to the German House for the team. Johannes Scherr, the then team doctor of the German alpine skiers, told the story New York Times, almost all of his athletes would drink the beer in training. Some observers suspected that the Germans had discovered a magic potion like the druid Miraculix once did.
That fits in well with the current situation. While beer consumption in Germany has been declining for years, alcohol-free beer is becoming increasingly popular, as the Federal Statistical Office has now officially announced. Since 2011, the production volume has increased by almost 75 percent. The breweries produced a good 411 million liters. This amount, used for classification, is roughly equivalent to the content of 164 Olympic 50-meter swimming pools. According to the market research company Nielsen, alcohol-free products currently have a market share of around seven percent in retail.
So the trend is not entirely new. The first non-alcoholic beer is said to have been brewed in the former GDR as early as the 1970s. This type of beer became really well-known a good 20 years ago, when the Bavarian brewery Erdinger launched a non-alcoholic wheat beer on the market in a very conscious manner. Before that, lead-free, as it is popularly known, had a rather bad reputation. It was considered “castrated beer” and a last resort for all the poor devils who had to drive in the evening after the party or who had been banned from alcohol by the doctor. In any case, non-alcoholic beverages were not known as luxury goods like they are today.
But then came the sport thing. Professional athletes drank non-alcoholic beer in public to replenish their energy tanks after grueling competitions like marathons. More and more breweries sponsored endurance events and marketed their products as sports drinks. Suddenly it was said about the non-alcoholic beverage that it was mineral, low in calories, isotonic and easy on the liver. Scientific studies supported many of these initial suspicions. Alcohol-free was now the beer of the healthy and clever, even though it has a higher sugar content than other types.
Nothing has changed to this day, on the contrary: More than ever, the alcohol-free hits the nerve of this time, in which many people live more health-consciously. German breweries now have 700 different non-alcoholic beers on the market. The German Brewers’ Association assumes that soon every tenth beer in this country will be alcohol-free. the New York Times was not wrong with the thesis of the doping of the Germans.