No alcohol, low alcohol, alcohol free...different expressions for the same thing, right?
Wrong.
How it's defined in the UK:
- Alcohol free means no more than 0.05% ABV
- 'De-alcoholised' means no more than 0.5% ABV
- Low alcohol means no more than 1.2% ABV.
Confused? Don’t worry, the Undrunk team will try to de-jargon the jargon.
Let’s start with an easy one: non-alcoholic
Drinks can be classed as non-alcoholic if they don’t contain alcohol. This could be soft drinks like fruit juice, sodas etc OR distilled drinks that have had NO ALCOHOL USED IN THE PROCESS AT ALL, like, none, whatsoever.
Ok, now for alcohol free.
What the official documents say:
“This should only be applied to a drink from which the alcohol has been extracted if it contains no more than 0.05% abv, and the products should also include the abv (or state that they contain no alcohol) on the label in order to use the descriptor.”
What they mean:
If some alcohol has been used to make the product but taken out at the end so that the % alcohol by volume (ABV) is less than 0.05% then you can call it alcohol free.
Let’s put this in perspective. 0.05% is so tiny, a ripe banana (not with the dark bits) has up to 0.2% alcohol in it.
Next, we’ve got de-alcoholised
What the official documents say:
“This term should only be applied to a drink from which the alcohol has been extracted if it contains no more than 0.5% abv and the product should also include an indication of its alcoholic strength (or state that it contains no alcohol).”
What they mean:
Like ‘alcohol free’, if alcohol is used in the process, it must be extracted or diluted down, but this time to 0.5% or less to class as de-alcoholised.
To make things more confusing, in Europe and the USA ‘alcohol free’ means a drink with 0.5% or less. To keep the lingo common for everyone, most producers in the UK also call their drinks ‘alcohol free’ if they contain up to 0.5% ABV, so keep an eye out for that one.
Let’s also put 0.5% ABV into perspective. Keeping on the theme of bananas, imagine a super ripe banana that’s got some squishy dark bits (gross, why would anyone want to eat a banana like that), well, that banana could have up to 0.4% alcohol in it.
Lastly, we’ve got low alcohol
What the official documents say:
“The drink must be 1.2% alcohol by volume (abv) or below and an indication of its maximum abv should be included on the label.”
We don’t think this needs any translation as it’s pretty self-explanatory.
Moving away from bananas, let’s put 1.2% ABV into perspective.
To make alcohol you need yeast to turn sugars in fruits or grains into ethanol (and carbon dioxide).
We all know that to make a delicious, fluffy loaf of bread you need to use yeast to convert sugar into carbon dioxide to get that rise; a by-product of the process is also ethanol, most of which evaporates off during the baking. So, your loaf of bread could have up to 1.9% of residual alcohol in it.
Now we don’t advise going off to eat loads of ripe (gross) bananas and loaves of bread to see what effect it will have, we just wanted to put some of the ABV numbers being banded around into perspective, so you have more idea what they mean.
If you are 100% teetotal, in recovery or don’t want to touch a drop for any other reason, then make sure you look really closely at the labels, so you aren’t caught out.
For everyone else, chose drinks with ABVs that you are comfortable with.
Ultimately, it’s down to you.
If you fancy having a read of the official document you can find it here, it’s a real page turner…