This Hazy Samuel Adams Beer Outshines The Boston Lager And Cherry Wheat (And Has Zero Alcohol)

It's hard to get non-alcoholic beers to have the fullness, complexity, and integration of flavor that alcoholic beers have. A lot of it comes down to how non-alcoholic beer is made — either we're missing a traditional beer yeast doing its thing and creating the fermentation-derived characteristics, or alcohol removal processes strip some of the flavor away. It might come as a surprise, then, that in Tasting Table's ranking of Samuel Adams beers, a Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA beat out both the legendary Boston Lager and the noteworthy Cherry Wheat.

While these two beers came in sixth and eighth place, respectively, Samuel Adams' Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA came in fourth, superseded only by its Summer Ale, Winter White Ale, and the Harvest Helles at number one. Tasting Table writer Megan Hageman appreciated the beer's juiciness, along with its sweetness, hop presence, and bright citrus and tropical fruit notes with subdued bitterness. In other words — it's a hazy IPA that might fool you into thinking it contains alcohol. This beer actually contains less than 0.5% alcohol by volume, the legal margin of error for non-alcoholic beers. 

One user on Untappd, the ultimate online courtroom for beer, echoed Hageman's opinion and said, "Wow, unexpectedly good. Nice flavor. Smooth and balanced... Probably the best 0.0 brew I've tasted." At the time of writing, Samuel Adams's Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA holds a 3.5-star rating from about 185 reviews on the platform, which is nothing to sniff at, especially for a non-alcoholic brew.

It seems like the Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA is a win and ticks a lot of boxes for those who want an alcohol-free New England-style IPA. However, some die-hard beer drinkers don't jive with how it achieves its flavor profile. One user on BeerAdvocate had suspicions about how a non-alcoholic beer got to be so juicy. "I googled the ingredients and this contains 'natural flavors' which I figured. Hard pass. I want to know what I'm drinking." Indeed, the Samuel Adams product page, describes it as a "Malt Beverage with natural flavors."

This sheds light on how this beer can express such luscious tropical and citrus notes, when these are often notes that suffer in alcohol-free brews — they're likely added in. Adjuncts, or added flavorings, are nothing alien to beer and brewing, so whether this ultimately matters is up to personal opinion. To some, having a non-alcoholic hazy IPA they can actually enjoy like an alcoholic beer is "mission accomplished."

It's stated in the Tasting Table article and elsewhere online that the Samuel Adams Non-Alcoholic Hazy IPA is a recently rebranded version of Sam Adams's equally popular "Just the Haze" beer of the same style. For the beer nerds out there, the Sam Adams site also lists the hop varieties used as Citra, Mosaic, Sabro, and Cascade. It also lists the haze-helping, high-protein malts, golden naked oats, and white wheat.