Not so long ago, a new law on the sale of alcoholic beverages was issued in Russia. It prohibits the sale of any alcohol-containing drinks at night. In this regard, disputes arose over whether non-alcoholic beer is considered to be a product called alcoholic beer.
Pick your recipe
What does the term beer mean?
To understand whether non-alcoholic beer is an alcoholic product, a definition of a beverage such as beer should be defined. Based on the article of the law on the control of the circulation and production of ethyl alcohol or any alcoholic products, as well as on the control of the use of these products (which, incidentally, does not refer to the classification of beer as “non-alcoholic” and “alcoholic”), we can read that beer is an alcoholic product that includes ethyl alcohol produced during the fermentation of beer wort produced by brewing malt.
The beer also includes hops, water, brewer's yeast, aromatic and flavoring additives.
Apparently, in this article, beer is a finished alcohol product, which contains no more than 0.5 percent ethyl alcohol. Non-alcoholic beer is beer in which the alcohol content is less than 0.5 percent. And they produce it by removing ethyl alcohol from the finished alcohol-containing product. From all of the above, we can conclude: since non-alcoholic beer contains less than 0.5 percent ethyl alcohol, then by definition such a drink is not an alcoholic product.
However, based on the same definition, beer cannot be called a beer.
Nevertheless, manufacturers call this drink beer, and, therefore, from the general definition of beer, non-alcoholic beer can be considered an alcoholic product.
In some stores, non-alcoholic beer can be bought even at night, as sellers emphasize that there is no alcohol in such a drink. If in these stores they decided not to attribute non-alcoholic beer to alcohol-containing products, it is sometimes sold even to children. It turns out that a child under the age of majority can come there and buy any amount of non-alcoholic beer. Such a situation is categorically dangerous, because even 0.5% alcohol in each can can lead to a serious consequence if you drink not one can of beer, but several.