This article was originally published in the January/February 2026 issue of The New Brewer.

By Mike Kallenberger

While speaking at the Montana Brewers Association in late 2024, beverage alcohol writer Kate Bernot pointed out an emerging trend: many newer beverage alcohol brands have literally incorporated a specific drinking occasion into their names, such as Sunday Beer, Pizza Wine, and High Noon’s Pool Pack.

Other beer experts, such as veteran beverage marketer Mark Gallo and Beer Crunchers Substacker Doug Veliky, took the discussion online and added their own examples to the list, most notably Garage Beer. Veliky then expanded on the trend of using the how and when of a drinking occasion as brand eponyms to include examples of the who, such as Mom Water, Skinny Girl Margarita, Real American Beer, and Dad Strength.

While those examples all pertain to individual brands, it can be argued that there is an entire segment of the industry that has largely been framing its role in terms of a single occasion: non-alcohol (NA) beer. In fact, at times it almost seems as if the entire NA beer segment may have been named after “the non-alcohol occasion,” so frequently do references to the latter appear in the press.

This is a natural response to the now widely reported fact that NA drinkers are typically pretty frequent beer drinkers who choose an NA option from time to time. (See Figure 1.) Or, as ads for Anheuser-Busch’s O’Doul’s touted during the first, modest surge of the NA segment during the late 1980s and early 1990s, “It’s what beer drinkers drink when they’re not drinking beer.”

Targeting “the NA occasion” as a single, undifferentiated experience has seemingly worked well for a number of NA brands in recent years, and it may continue to succeed for certain larger brands. But as the NA segment further develops—in particular, as new brands proliferate—strategic focus may require more than painting the occasion in a single broad stroke. When developing or refining a brand positioning, it can be helpful to think about the different benefits sought by different drinkers when choosing an NA option, and to target one of those benefits specifically.

NA Line Extensions

Historically, many marketers have built their positioning strategies by borrowing a guiding framework from journalism known as the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. Who is the brand for? What other activities or experiences is it best suited to accompany? When and where will people drink it most often? Why should drinkers choose this brand instead of another? What’s new in the trend unearthed by Bernot and others isn’t so much positioning based on when, where, or who as it is about incorporating the answers specifically and explicitly (and even audaciously) into the brand name.

“It felt risky, but it also felt like the right move for us.”
—Angie Anderson-May, former senior innovation and insights manager at Deschutes

As the NA segment has developed, some breweries have chosen to introduce their NA as a line extension. This is especially true of the global mega brewers (think Heineken 0.0 or Michelob Ultra Zero), although some larger craft brewers have pursued this approach as well. Here’s what may or may not be obvious about the line extension approach: the most important W being targeted is not the when (i.e., the NA occasion) but the implied who. In other words, “It’s what my brand’s drinkers drink when they’re not drinking beer.” Larger breweries can afford to treat the NA occasion broadly because the specificity comes from targeting the substantial drinker base provided by the parent brand.

Deschutes Brewery introduced Black Butte Non-Alcoholic as a line extension of its iconic Black Butte Porter in late 2021 when “Nobody in craft was really taking their flagship beer and bringing it into the NA space,” according to Angie Anderson-May, former senior innovation and insights manager at Deschutes. Acknowledging that line extensions come with challenges of their own, she added, “It felt risky, but it also felt like the right move for us.”

Anderson-May, as the project manager and brand manager for Black Butte NA, kept the development process on track, testing early versions with customers and shaping the strategy. She pointed out that Deschutes had a couple of exploitable advantages when developing an NA offering. First, “it’s simpler to match the flavor profile of a dark beer so it was a good place to start as we began experimenting.” Second, Black Butte Porter had a large and well-established “captive audience” of customers who could be targeted through a line extension.

Black Butte Non-Alcoholic quickly surpassed its early targets and even held the top velocity spot in the brewery’s portfolio for a period after launch. Its 2022 World Beer Cup silver medal (and gold in 2024) only strengthened its credibility. Thus encouraged, Deschutes followed up by introducing two new NA beers in 2024. Non-Alcoholic Fresh Squeezed IPA follows a similar playbook as Black Butte NA. But it may be noteworthy that Super Stoked Golden Non-Alcoholic isn’t a line extension but rather a new brand with no evident reference to Deschutes on the label.

“Super Stoked had a different job to do,” Anderson-May explained. “Black Butte NA is a perfect fit for fans, but Super Stoked was built to reach people who might not think of Deschutes first. A golden NA is more approachable for a lot of drinkers and fits an easygoing occasion, so we let it be its own brand.”

The Consumer Conundrum

Strong positioning demands that brands answer what is arguably the most important W: the why. Why should someone choose this brand over another? What problem do we help people solve? What functional or emotional benefit do we offer to help solve that problem? In these still-early stages of segment development, the why being addressed by most NA beers has been “because I don’t want a drink with alcohol right now.”

As NA brands proliferate, it will become virtually mandatory to articulate that consumer problem with greater insight. Why don’t my drinkers want a drink with alcohol right now? There are multiple potential answers, but brands really gain traction when they put a stake in the ground in terms of an emotional motivation. This will be particularly important for brands who want to attract drinkers beyond their current base.

Eventually consumer researchers will map out an entire landscape of all the potential answers to the why of non-alcohol beer, but as of now three relevant motivations are fairly obvious: overall health (a long-term benefit), avoiding a hangover (a next-day benefit), and maintaining sobriety (an in-the-moment benefit).

For perspective on each of these, we can turn to the Kantar MONITOR survey. While the survey isn’t a beer study and so doesn’t directly address these NA-specific motivations, it does ask respondents about their values and motivations in life more generally, through which we can infer what emotional benefits matter to NA beer drinkers.

Figure 2 compares the prevalence of some key motivations among two groups of drinkers. The left bar in each pair captures all weekly alcohol beverage drinkers and the right reflects those who drink low- or no-alcohol beverages weekly.

Much has been written about the increasing importance Americans are placing on health and wellness today, and its potential contribution to the growth of NA beer. And as the first pair of bars in Figure 2 shows, a third of all LA (low alcohol)/NA drinkers do say that actively pursuing good health is “extremely important” to them. Yet good health is only marginally more important to this group of drinkers than it is to alcohol beverage drinkers in general.

But two other emotional benefits do appear to be sought more often by LA/NA drinkers than by drinkers in general. And we would speculate that each of them is relevant to at least one of the tangible benefits of NA beer cited above.

The second pair of bars in Figure 2 indicates that the stability derived from having plans and routines is more likely to be valued by LA/NA drinkers, and therefore may well be a meaningful reason to choose an NA option—perhaps in no small part because a hangover can be a major disruption to plans and routines.

The third pair of bars in Figure 2 shows that avoiding interruptions to one’s focus and attention is also associated with a somewhat greater likelihood of being an LA/NA drinker. This suggests that staying focused is a relevant emotional benefit in the eyes of some NA drinkers, presumably because they most value maintaining their sobriety in the moment.

The larger point, though, is that putting a stake in the ground by associating a brand with a single tangible benefit can be one way to tap into a finer degree of occasion-targeting, especially when marketing and communication link that to an emotional benefit such as stability or self-control.

Health and Wellness as a Long-Term Benefit

None of this should be taken to imply that health and wellness can’t be effective as a positioning platform for an NA beer. To the contrary, Athletic Brewing builds much of its messaging around health, and a brewery selling more than 400,000 barrels of NA beer a year is clearly doing a lot right.

Even the name Athletic was chosen because co-founder Bill Shufelt’s goal was to “…be a little more active, and a little healthier.” The brand ethos is “to promote healthy lifestyles, sustainable practices and community engagement.” And while the brewery’s website does reference “tomorrow” repeatedly, it largely treats “tomorrow” less as “the day after today” and more as a metaphor for an aspirational long-term future.

But—and this is a significant “but” for our purposes—the key word in the above summation is “lifestyle.” Athletic’s proposition resonates most deeply not with those looking for an occasional alternative to alcohol, but those seeking long-term health by avoiding alcohol more often than not. (For what it’s worth, Shufelt himself gave up alcohol “over a decade ago.”)

This means that Athletic’s health-and-wellness proposition is effectively targeting a who—an optimistic, motivated, aspirational consumer—rather than a when/where, i.e., an occasion. It works because Athletic is a bit of a unicorn: a larger craft brewery focused exclusively on NA beer. But a health-and-wellness focus may be less effective for a brewery who sees its NA beer as a role-player within a larger alcohol portfolio, where a focus on stability or self-control within an occasion will likely be more motivating.

Targeting Occasions

Where will the non-alcohol beer segment be five years from now? It’s a good bet that it will be meaningfully larger than it is today. Larger craft brands are likely to do quite well with NA line extensions, if they choose that route, and building their positioning around the who.

But we just may find that the breweries doing the most to expand their audience will have done so by targeting the when, the where, and the why. Maybe a couple will even name their NA after a specific occasion, adding to the growing list.

Mike Kallenberger is senior advisor, marketing insights and strategy at First Key, a brewery consulting firm. His experience includes working with clients such as Sierra Nevada, Pabst, Malteurop North America, and many others around the world. He is an award-winning contributor to The New Brewer.