Athletic are beer lovers at heart. But they also love being healthy and active. These conflicting passions created an internal struggle. Why couldn’t these loves live in harmony? Yes, there was alcohol-free beer - but the founders of Athletic were lovers of great tasting beer. Maybe it just wasn’t possible, but they had to give it a try.A few years and hundreds of recipes later, Athletic Brewing Company was born - the first brewery and tap room fully devoted to the production of alcohol-free craft beer in the US.

In researching brewing techniques Athletic found all the industrial technologies being utilized for non-alcoholic beer production were at least 30-40 years old, made for high volume macro beers, with no hop flavour or aroma, and most importantly, lacking true craft character.

So they set out with the idea that their beer needed to be fully fermented without an industrial process. This artisanal approach would let the ingredients express their most delicate compounds and esters developed and metabolized in fermentation. After two years of analysing the major brewing school textbooks, they got to brewing at home in the garage. Through hundreds of trials, tweaking natural variables like temperature, they found that with about 12-15 changes to the normal brewing process, they could brew super session-able beer that was fully fermented and conditioned to under 0.5% ABV.