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Recently there has been a surge in people cutting back on alcohol consumption but looking for something to drink instead. There’s only so many cups of coffee or pints of lemonade you can consume in an evening. And of course there are often people who have to drive home. So, many of the breweries have started producing low-alcohol beers to cater to these drinkers. Low-alcohol lager has been around a long time, but this is not the case for bitter – because it’s not too difficult to make low-alcohol lager or cider that tastes acceptable, but unfortunately much more difficult to make decent low-alcohol bitter. But anyway, to meet the demand, various breweries have been trying to rise to the challenge. In some cases, they have given their beer a clear unambiguous label, for example ‘Doombar Zero’. But in other cases you have to be more careful. One brewery, Adnams, produces a beer called Ghost Ship’ (https://adnams.co.uk/products/12x500ml-adnams-ghost-shipbottles-4-5-abv) and it also produces a low-alcohol version of the same beer (https://adnams.co.uk/products/8x500ml-adnams-ghost-ship-0-5). The first one I encountered was the low-alcohol version and in my mind I equated the ‘ghost’ with the (almost) alcohol-free status. I thought ‘Ghost ship, no crew on it; ghost beer, no alcohol in it’ and I thought it was rather clever, it made sense to me. So then I was rather surprised when I found the ‘regular’ 4.5% alcoholic version of the same beer and I thought this was rather confusing. Having talked to various other people about it, many have also been confused by it and sometimes are not even sure which one they had! Others like the fact that they can get a low-alcohol version of their favourite bitter. What do you think? All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2024.