Your actual real life alcohol-free ‘zebra striping’

The increasing ubiquity, quality and variety of alcohol-free beer has meant that it’s slowly become a meaningful part of our drinking habits. A few years ago it was common for people like the late Peter ‘Pub Curmudgeon’ Edwardson to argue that nobody ever drank AF beer except as an emergency measure. For example, because they were the designated driver. And if you told them that, actually, you were going to pay for cabs for everyone, they’d hurl their half-finished bottle of Heineken 0.0 into the nearest bin and order a barley wine to start catching up. This was largely true, we think, because however much we kidded ourselves, almost no AF beers were truly enjoyable. In craft beer circles, where being fussy and having high standards were part of the game, why would we expect people to be tolerant of thin, vegetal, fizzy, weird-tasting brews? But some people do actually like them. Ray’s mum, for example, is actually excited to drink BrewDog Punk AF. Perhaps it’s because she’s never…