Jamie Fulton sits at a table on the second floor of Community Beer Co. near floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook a large courtyard and cornhole pit. It's all empty at 9 a.m. on a gray weekday. There's a scent of hops in the air. Fulton is muscular and lean and is rather serious but friendly. His laptop is on the table in front of him along with about a dozen cans of nonalcoholic beer sweating from the humidity in the building.
Fulton is the head brewer at Community and has been since its inception in 2013. The Dallas-based brewery has grown to be one of the top independent beer producers in the state. Community’s IPA, Mosaic, a delightfully hop-ish beer, helped convert many Dallasites to craft beer with its balanced floral and citrus notes. Along with Revolver’s Blood and Honey, Peticolas' Velvet Hammer, Lakewood’s Temptress and Deep Ellum’s Dallas Blonde, it, arguably, led the craft beer charge in Dallas. Imbibers have happily waded in their frothy waters ever since.
During the pandemic, Community moved into this large modern space just west of Interstate 35 and north of downtown. It’s a full-production facility — all their beer is produced, packaged and sealed with a kiss here — and there's a restaurant and taproom. On weekends, doodle dogs and their families fill the courtyard.
We’d initially called Fulton to talk about a growing trend of nonalcoholic (NA) offerings from local brewers; what’s driving the trend, and how is it working out? Only, we heard something we didn’t expect.
“I’m completely sober,” Fulton said.
He didn’t lead with this point. Understandably, any brewer might hold their sobriety card close to their chest, especially one who attended the Siebel Institute of Technology's lauded brewing program and won six Great American Beer Festival awards (including one for their NA beer) and two World Beer Cup medals. He wanted to steer the conversation toward the proprietary brewing method he and his team created to craft a new style of nonalcoholic beer, which we’d get to. But first … What was that?
“So I stopped drinking,” he offered up. “I had some liver issues, and I was flirting around with just drinking less, and it did not matter to my liver if I drank less or more. It’s really just bad genetics.”
Fulton’s dry journey started with a life insurance policy. He’s married and the father of three boys. He wanted to make sure his family would always be taken care of. So a medic came to the brewery one day to draw blood as part of the insurance application, and the results showed his liver enzymes were “through the roof.”
“So yeah, a red flag,” Fulton said. “My doctor was like, 'All right, well, let's have you stop drinking for a month.’ And my enzymes went back to normal. So then I tried adding just a little bit back in, but no, my liver just does not like alcohol. My doctor pretty much said I just have a bad gene for drinking alcohol.”
It took a while to get his head — and spirit — around not drinking. He tried to ignore it, but realized that wasn’t a long-term solution. And he does admit that before his liver threw out the warning signals, he drank more than he should have at times. To get his liver healthy, he’d have to abstain, minus tasting beer as part of the development process, seeing as he’s a brewer.
Was he worried about his job?
“Absolutely,” he admitted, stone-cold soberly. “That’s been my identity.”
All Hopped Up
Kevin Carr is the founder of Community Brewing. Imagine running one of the largest craft breweries in the state and moving into a huge new facility, only to learn that your head brewer, who has been with you since day one, is no longer drinking.“My initial reaction was more on the personal side,” Carr said. “First, as a friend, listen to the reasons for it. But I, of course, wondered how that would affect the business moving forward.”
Fulton assured him it wouldn’t affect what they do, and Carr, knowing Fulton’s drive, never questioned him.
“He’s an expert at flavorings and the technical sides of brewing. We only pretty much had the one conversation about it and never really talked about it again,” Carr said.
Fulton still tastes beer — and, yes, swallows — to experience the mouthfeel and aftertaste. And he’s continued to expand beer operations with many new releases.
He isn’t the only one cutting back, though. In fact, Fulton is on trend.
Overall, younger adults in the United States are drinking less. A Gallup study that looked at drinking trends over several years found that 62% of adults ages 18–34 said they drink, which is down from 72% two decades ago. And of those, only 13% admitted to “overdrinking,” down from 21% in 2001–03. They’re also drinking fewer drinks: 3.6 per session in 2021–23 versus 5.2 drinks in 2001–03.
While some categories of drinkers are abstaining, many are just drinking less. This suggests that, although a glass of soda water might wet your whistle, imbibers still crave the nuance, mouthfeel and craftsmanship found in a beer or cocktail, just without the side effects.
The organization International Wine and Spirit Research studies beverage trends and predicts a 9% growth in the nonalcoholic market in the period 2022–26, outpacing a 5% jump in the category 2018–22. The data also shows the U.S., in addition to Australia and France, has the highest proportion of “millennial new entrants” in the low-alcohol category. Boomers account for the lowest proportion of “new entrants” in the low-alcohol market in the U.S.
Perhaps more telling, Neilsen and CGA, a global information services company, found that "better for you products," wellness, moderation in consumption and nonalcoholic choices are leading beverage trends. Additionally, Numerator, a data technology company that studies market trends, reports that over the past two years, NA beverages have been the third-fastest-growing category in the U.S.
There has also been a rise in the popularity of hard seltzer, which has thrown craft beer makers for a loop over the past few years. Some are expanding their portfolios; last year Community launched a line of vodka, agave silver and whiskey.
“We’re having to pivot and become a beverage company,” Fulton said. “We’re already in spirits, and we’re obviously doing nonalcoholic, and we’re launching cannabis.”
The Problem With NA Beers
After the red-flag bloodwork and move to the new brewery, Fulton started researching NA beer. It led to some unique brewer anxieties.“I would dream of hops,” he said. “I would dream of drinking just beer in general. I love hops. Me and some of my team here go to Yakima Valley [in Washington State] every year to select our hops because we buy so much. And so we absolutely love hops. You can see that in our portfolio. Our beers are hop-forward. We’re known for our hoppy beers, we love new hops, everything hops.”
After he quit drinking Fulton lost 20 pounds and got fit. He rises at 4 a.m. to hit the gym, which he built in the brewery. So he wanted to create an NA beer that wasn’t the equivalent of a bowl of pasta in terms of carbohydrates and calories but also had the flavors of his frothy hop dreams.
But the problem with brewing NA beer is that the process of removing alcohol by heat or by minimizing fermentation simultaneously removes the aroma from hops as well as that rich mouthfeel, and it can lead to off flavors. It’s also more susceptible to pathogens growing in cans.
Fulton found a way, although he isn’t spilling the hops on his proprietary process.
“I can't tell you all the secrets, or the way that I came up with doing it,” he said, “but nobody's doing it like this. So mine's not pasteurized because I'm not leaving all that maltose in there. Now, the drawback is that it's not full of carbohydrates, and so some people might say it's thin.”
Maltose is a type of sugar that plays a key role in the fermentation of beer and is also a main source of calories in beer.
He compares Athletic Brewing Company's Golden or IPA, a popular national NA beer line, to Nada, Community's NA line of beer. The difference is apparent. Athletic is richer and has more body, but also has more carbs and calories. (Roughly twice the amount, depending on the beer, not four times as much as we previously reported.) Nada IPA, pilsner and hazy IPA each weigh in at around 25 calories and 5 grams of carbs, with less than 0.5% alcohol by volume. Nonalcoholic drinks contain less than 0.5% ABV, while "low-alcohol" drinks contain between 0.5% and 2.49%. "Alcohol-free" drinks contain 0% alcohol.
Athletic's pilsner-style brew, Athletic Lite, matches Community's specs, delivering 25 calories and 5 grams of carbs.
Under the “Pairs Well With” section on Community’s website, the NA offerings are described as, “When hangovers just can’t be a thing in your life.”
Cracking the NA Beer Code
Brendan Smith is a cicerone (beer sommelier) certified beer server with an aficionado nonalcoholic beer certification (AFNA). After serving in the Navy, he worked at Franconia Brewing Co. for two years with legendary local German brewer Dennis Wherman, then went to Craft and Growler to run the taproom's tanks for a while. He also reviews NA beers on his YouTube channel, “The Brewing Sailor.”Smith was in a car accident and got a DUI in 2021, leading him to discover and study NA beers.
“I’m ashamed of my actions, but not ashamed I took responsibility for it,” he said. “And I’ll never be caught in that same position again.”
He sees two problems with NA beer.
“First, it has a stigma, right, because we are an alcohol-drinking culture,” said Smith, who is 45. “So there's this stigma of what's the point of drinking nonalcoholic? And whether that's beer or mocktails, there's this stigma around it that you're somehow wussing out or whatever if you drink NA.”
The other problem is that until very recently, nonalcoholic beer, at least in the U.S., just hasn’t been very appealing.
“It tastes like beer-flavored water and often only slightly beer-flavored,” Smith said.
He sees innovation and demand pushing things along: “I don't want to say nonalcoholic beer has caught up to the rest of the craft beer world, but they're starting to catch up to the rest of the craft beer world.”
He also sees more health-conscious millennials and Gen Zers drinking less, wanting to socialize but without the calories or alcohol.
Collin Zreet co-founded Funky Picnic Brewery and Cafe in Fort Worth, which unfortunately closed its doors in early May. He’s an advanced cicerone, third level, of which there are only eight in Texas. He was a judge at the Great American Beer Festival last year for the NA division.
“At least from a flavor standpoint,” Zreet said, “alcohol in beer naturally comes from the sugars, which comes from the malt. So that alcohol and the malt, in the same boat, provide a bit of sweetness to the beer. So if you don't have that in there, it's kind of hard to balance out some of that bitterness.”
But the demand is there, pushing brewers to tap into this slow-drinking movement.
“Where I actually see it in the marketplace is more for people who are still drinking alcohol, but maybe there are certain occasions where they still want a beer but not an alcoholic beer,” Zreet says. He also sees NA beer as a sometimes-replacement but not a complete replacement.
The zero-proof retailer Boisson recently shuttered all its stores across the country and filed for bankruptcy. An article in Punch suggested that there will always be a demand for shops that sell only NA spirits, but perhaps the bigger demand is buying NA products alongside fully loaded beverages.
“So by having just an entirely NA space didn't work,” Zreet says. “But they were noticing that when people would go into other stores, they would get an NA six-pack of beer, but then maybe a regular six-pack of beer also to have for different occasions. So that's really where I see it growing is more in addition to traditional beer, not in replacement of.”
This is where Fulton sees his business going: a beverage company, not just a brewery. And leave it to the social-media generation of Gen Zers and millennials to lead this charge of “better for you” products, whether it’s for a life insurance policy or when hangovers just aren't a thing in your life.
