"How Do You Remove the Alcohol?" — We Don't.

How It's Made · Brewing Process

"How Do You Remove the Alcohol?" — We Don't.

It's the question we get asked more than any other. And our answer surprises people every time: we don't remove anything from our beer — we brew it as a zero from the start.

How the Big Brands Do It: Vacuum Distillation

Until about five years ago, the only way to produce a non-alc beer was to remove the alcohol: brew a full-strength beer first, then heat it in a vacuum and distil the alcohol off. This is the approach the big international lager brands use — Heineken 0.0, Peroni, Asahi. It's efficient, it's effective at reaching 0.0%, and the results taste pretty good if you want a light lager.

But there's a catch. A lot of the tasty beer bits — the aroma, the body — get distilled off along with the alcohol. So before the beer is ready for sale, there's one more step: adding sugar, hop aroma and sodium back in to rebuild what the process stripped out.

The Breakthrough That Changed Everything

What if you want a zero that tastes the way good beer should — with the esters, aromas, polyphenols, bitterness and body intact? You need a method that never strips them out in the first place.

Four years ago came a breakthrough in yeast cultivation. Suddenly we could brew beer the way it's been brewed for millennia — natural fermentation, whole ingredients — and land at under 0.5% alcohol. A few tweaks to fermentation temperatures and ingredient timing, pasteurise, done. With that new yeast, and a drive to give Kiwis a better choice in beer, State of Play was born.

Our proprietary yeast fully ferments the simple sugars from the malts, producing all the delicious aromas and esters at just 0.3% alcohol. Nothing removed, nothing rebuilt. And don't just take our word for it — there are 430+ State of Play reviews that say it better than we can.

Want the full deep-dive on both methods, side by side? Read the complete guide: How Is Non-Alcoholic Beer Made? (And Why Ours Tastes Better).

Quick Answers

Is non-alcoholic beer really alcohol-free?
State of Play is brewed to 0.3% alcohol — the lowest achievable through natural fermentation — and labelled under 0.5% as NZ food standards require. For context: orange juice, sourdough bread and ripe fruit contain more alcohol than our beer, and none of them have to label it. Soy sauce can reach 18% abv.

Can you get drunk on non-alcoholic beer?
Short answer: no. The average adult body continuously processes drinks of around 2.5% alcohol — at 0.3%, our beer is metabolised far faster than it could ever accumulate.