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Increasingly, Denverites are opting for beverages with lower—or even nonexistent—alcohol contents. If you’re riding the wave, check out any of these local makers’ NA and low-ABV options, which are tasty (and sometimes even healthy) without the boozy punch.
Read More: How To Stock the Perfect Mocktail Bar Cart
Jump Ahead:
Grüvi
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Like so many successful companies, Denver-based Grüvi was born when its founders, the sister-brother team of Anika and Niki Sawni, couldn’t find what they were looking for. “We started to question the normalization of our drinking culture,” Anika says, “but Niki and I love going out for dinner with friends and entertaining. The biggest barrier for us cutting our alcohol consumption was not having alternative options that felt equally as exciting and tasted good.”
So, in 2019, the Denverites launched Grüvi. Nearly six years and a few high-profile awards later—including a World Beer Cup Gold for the brand’s golden lager—Grüvi’s NA beers and wines are in almost 5,000 stores across North America.
The Sawnis spent the past year tweaking recipes and updating packaging designs for a rebrand that launched in December. Now, Anika says, they’re turning their focus to getting into more gathering places. “A big evolution we’re seeing in the space is that shift from at-home drinking to on-premise—bars and restaurants and venues,” Anika says, adding that Grüvi is already on offer at Mission Ballroom, Ball Arena, and Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre. “Our vision is to normalize NA beverages and get to a point where they’re celebrated—which we actually don’t feel that far from anymore.”
4 Grüvi Beverages To Try
1. Dry Secco 2.0
This new version of Grüvi’s take on sparkling wine is dealcoholized, meaning the crisp bubbly started as regular wine. The resulting drink has more authentic flavors and aromas than formulated nonalcoholic wine, which doesn’t go through fermentation.
2. Mocha Moment
Like Grüvi’s wines, its beers are dealcoholized, but then they go through a final fermentation cycle to reintroduce elements—such as Mocha Moment’s rich coffee and chocolate flavors—that can be lost during the alcohol removal process.
3. Sangria
Most NA red wines taste like grape juice, but not Grüvi’s effervescent red sangria. The fruit flavors are balanced by cinnamon and clove, and in 2023 it earned a 95 from the International Wine and Spirit Competition, making it the highest-rated NA wine in North America that year.
4. Juicy Dayz IPA
Your palate may not be able to tell the difference between this tropical, citrusy sipper and its high-ABV counterparts, but your waistline will: Each 12-ounce can has 50 calories, versus the 200 to 250 in standard hazies.
Andiamo Brew
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After reconnecting at a memorial for their late grandparents more than a decade ago, cousins Brian Terra (right) and Kevin Barnes vowed to start a brewery that would honor their Italian heritage. To them, that translated to exclusively crafting beers with less than four percent ABV, in tribute to the sessionable Pilsners, lagers, and ales popular in many European countries.
In April 2024, Andiamo Brew—translation: “Let’s go”—was born. Using equipment at Copper Kettle Brewing Company in southeast Denver, Barnes (brewer) and Terra (sales and business manager) produce and sell kegs to taprooms and restaurants around town.
We caught up with the recent Centennial State transplants to chat about the brand and why there’s a brewing market for low-ABV beer in Denver. —Patricia Kaowthumrong
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
5280: What made you decide to focus on sub-four-percent ABV beers?
Kevin Barnes: I see a new brewery launching a nonalcoholic beer every week, it seems. I see brewers who are leading trends making more four percent, five percent low-ABV beers. I think that’s what brewers and the mature craft beer connoisseur go toward now. I wanted to make the beers that I want to drink, which are low ABV and are, at the same time, traditional and modern and experimental. The kind of beers I want to drink aren’t milkshake stouts.
Why Denver?
Brian Terra: I had just got out to Colorado, and [Kevin thought] it was the perfect spot to really to put this idea to work. He said, “Let’s do middle-ground beers, or low- or no-alcohol beers.”
Barnes: In the Denver area, specifically, our concept is resonant because we’ve already got breweries that are very popular here like Bierstadt, which does low-alcohol traditional lagers.
How does your Italian heritage play into Andiamo’s brews?
Barnes: We’re already distinctive in doing low-ABV beer, but one more angle that is natural for us is to make all of our beers Italian-inspired. We’re going to do an Italian red lager with espresso [the Caffetino, to be released this spring] and an amaro beer, eventually.
Terra: We’re also working on a rosé pale ale [for spring].
Has the response to your beers changed since you sold your first keg?
Terra: When I first started talking to customers, some were a little skeptical. They were like, “I don’t know if anybody’s going to want to drink that; they’re not getting the bang for their buck.” Now they’re telling me people are requesting low-alcohol beers more and more. I think it’s catching on.
Do you think that’s because the beer drinker is changing?
Barnes: 100 percent. People are drinking less. People are moderating their alcohol intake. Most people that drink nonalcoholic beer don’t exclusively drink that. One out of their three for the night will be a nonalcoholic. It’s not like they don’t drink alcohol anymore. They’re just supplementing—so they drink less alcohol, but they can have the same amount of beers.
Look for Andiamo’s creations—such as the herbaceous Piccolito Pilsner, grapefruit-forward Flying Bear lagered pale ale, and Czech dark lager Night Music—on tap at spots across the city. A regularly updated list of locations is here.
Prost Brewing Co.
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Day-drinking may be a beloved pastime on the Front Range, but eight-percent IPAs make it tough to last till sundown. So, when nearly 13-year-old Prost Brewing Co. turned on the taps at a 70,000-square-foot production facility and biergarten in Northglenn in January 2024, revelers were happy to discover a lineup of brews that help them prolong the fun. Prost, which also has taprooms in LoHi, Highlands Ranch, and Fort Collins, churns out kegs and cans of Pilsner, kölsch, weizenbock, and other classic German biers. More than half of those are five percent ABV or less, but this past October, the brewery went even lower by releasing a crisp, malty NA Pilsner.
There is also NA kombucha (available as a drink or a shot) and a sangrialike mocktail made with apple and cranberry juices, black tea, juniper berry, cloves, and ginger to go along with traditional cocktails, such as frozen margs and old fashioneds. That means the sprawling spot, which opens at 11 a.m. Friday through Sunday (and 2 p.m. the rest of the week), truly has something for everyone—from teetotalers to those partaking in Frühschoppen, the German and Austrian custom of boozing before noon.
Visit the airy two-story bier hall for dozens of widely spaced picnic tables; garage doors that open to an artificial-turf-lined patio with lawn games, a stage for live music, and a fire pit; and a counter-service eatery that serves giant pretzels, mushroom-gravy-smothered cheese curds and fries, sausage boards, and other rib-sticking bites to soak up whatever beverage you choose. —PK
Read More: Inside Prost’s New, Huge Northglenn Brewhouse
WeldWerks Brewing Co. Itsy Bits
In honor of WeldWerks Brewing Co.’s first anniversary in 2016, the Greeley-based craft brewery released a hazy IPA that quickly became its flagship product. Despite 6.7 percent ABV Juicy Bits’ popularity, however, head brewer Skip Schwartz and his team haven’t been afraid to mess with perfection. In fact, their Bits series has produced more than 100 variations, including Itsy Bits—a pale ale with similar fruit-forward notes and a lower ABV that has also developed a rabid following.
“Juicy Bits has its own family tree,” Schwartz says. “We want everyone to be able to find something [within it].”
Here, a by-the-numbers snapshot of the least-boozy member of the citrus-rich beer’s brood. —PK
3.5: The difference in ABVs between the clean and crushable Itsy Bits (5.1 percent) and the supremely creamy, double-dry-hopped Extra Extra Juicy Bits (8.6 percent). Both won medals at the 2019 Great American Beer Festival.
22: Percent less grain Itsy Bits uses, compared to Juicy Bits. While the process is similar for making low and high ABV beers, the former requires less grain, the ingredient that turns into sugar (and, eventually, alcohol) during brewing.
3: Types of hops—Citra, Mosaic, and El Dorado—added to both Itsy Bits and Juicy Bits to achieve the flavor of pulp-heavy citrus juice while maintaining a silky mouthfeel.
2025: The year WeldWerks hopes to make Itsy Bits, formerly only available occasionally, a year-round product. “I think a lot of people are trending toward…what you might call a lifestyle beer,” Schwartz says.
Corpse Reviver
In 2020, Anna Zesbaugh got into the beverage industry by taking a typically nonalcoholic product, kombucha, and using it to make booze-infused blends under the name Hooch Booch, now sold in Whole Foods. In August 2023, Zesbaugh launched the Blind Tiger Lounge in RiNo to serve as a taproom for Hooch Booch and a bar with other drink options. So, it might seem surprising that the latest endeavor in her Better Buzz Brands portfolio is decidedly not hard: a line of zero-proof, tea-based, canned functional beverages.
However, Zesbaugh says it was demand for NA options at both Blind Tiger and markets where Hooch Booch had booths that inspired her to create Corpse Reviver, named after a classic hair-of-the-dog cocktail, in January 2024. “It hit me one day that I could do a corpse reviver that’s actually a corpse reviver,” Zesbaugh says. “It’s good for you.”
With three flavors—guava rose, botanical, and prickly pear—and packaging that’s much sexier than, say, the outside of an Olipop or Powerade, Corpse Reviver has found a variety of audiences. Local bars are selling the gorgeous cans and mixing the bubbly liquid into mocktails and cocktails; fitness fanatics are packing Corpse Revivers to crack after hot yoga classes; and office-dwellers are replacing their afternoon coffees with the energy-boosting bevvies, which contain potassium, L-theanine, magnesium, zinc, and sodium. In fact, in its first year, Corpse Reviver did four times the sales of Hooch Booch.
“It’s the athleisure of the beverage world,” Zesbaugh says. “You can go for your hot girl walk and have a Corpse Reviver after.”
Read More: How To Stock the Perfect Mocktail Bar Cart
