DENVER — When Samuel Adams Brewing Co. released “Just the Haze” four years ago, it marked the culmination of a two-year effort to create a non-alcoholic beer that didn’t taste like one.
The 0.5%-ABV Hazy IPA went on to win gold in the Great American Beer Festival’s Non-Alcohol Beer category in 2022 — and is now widely available in the Memphis area.
During Sam Adams’ Beers & Brunch media session at the 2025 Great American Beer Festival last week, Samuel Adams founder Jim Koch explained how Just the Haze came to be and how it changed his mind about brewing non-alcoholic beers.
“NA beers taste like shit”
“For most of my 40-plus years here, people would ask, ‘Why don’t you make an ‘NA’ Sam Adams?’ And I said, ‘Because NA beers taste like shit,’” Koch told the audience.
“There’s no point in making a beer that tastes like shit. There’s a whole lot of NA things you can drink that are called Coca-Cola and orange juice and water, and they don’t taste like shit, so … (you) don’t have to make a bad beer.”
For decades, Koch said, the non-alcoholic options available to drinkers — “the Kalibers, the O’Doul’s, the St. Pauli Girl NA, Buckler” — were “basically carbonated wort.”
“They had that graininess to me. It was just unpleasant. They didn’t taste good.”
The turning point
“To be totally honest, my eyes were opened … pre-COVID at one of the Beer Business Daily things out in San Diego,” he said. “That would’ve been maybe 2019 or 2017. At the 10:00 break, they had Heineken 0.0, and I opened it — skeptical — and I drank it. And I’ll give credit to them, said, ‘Wow, this does not taste like shit. This actually … I would drink this.'”
That moment, he said, changed everything.
“So we immediately set out to figure out what did they do? How did they do it?”
Two years of experimentation
Sam Adams spent more than two years experimenting with the methods and the beer that became Just the Haze.
Sam Adams’ process involves low-alcohol producing yeast, as well as a vacuum de-alcoholizer that removes the alcohol without damaging the beer.
The equipment, Koch said, is “very expensive and takes some technical skill to run,” but it’s led to NA beers that have taken a “quantum leap in taste.”
“We had a high standard for it. My standard was that in blind — double-blind, actually — consumer tests, that Just the Haze would get as high a ranking as Wicked Hazy, which was the base beer that it came from. And when we got to that point, that’s when we released it.”
Sam Adams uses its two-row pale malt blend, White Wheat and Golden Naked Oats, along with Citra, Mosaic, Sabro and Cascade hops.
The result is a juicy, crushable 98-calorie Hazy IPA that won’t give you a headache.
“It’s a beer that has created its occasions,” Koch said. “If you love beer, there’s a time when you want to have a beer, but maybe it’s not a good idea. It’s the fourth beer at dinner or, you know, I’ve just gotten off a really long bike ride and I know I’m dehydrated, and I don’t want to throw back two alcoholic beers, two Boston Lagers.”
What’s next
With NA beer sales projected to see 8% annual growth over the next few years, according to IWSR data, Sam Adams is planning to continue to experiment in the NA beer space.
“We’re slowly trying to figure out how to extend that to maybe an Oktoberfest or a summer ale,” Koch said.
