After a year of trial and research, Longmont, Colorado-based Bootstrap Brewing will launch its first non-alcoholic offering, Strapless IPA, the company announced yesterday.
The wait didn’t bother Bootstrap owner and brewer Steve Kaczeus, who said the company worked with partner ABV Technology to “develop a great tasting non-alcoholic beer.”
“That’s usually my M.O.,” he said. “I’m an engineer, and everything’s got to be perfect.”
Strapless IPA will launch in November and checks in at 100 calories and 40 IBUs. The beer has a blend of Galaxy, Mosaic and Citra hops, as well as electrolytes and minerals, such as magnesium, potassium, sodium and chloride. The project had special appeal for Kaczeus.
“I’m living more of an active lifestyle — a lot of hiking, biking, a lot of running,” he said. “I found that I didn’t want to drink water to rehydrate. I didn’t want to drink some of the sugary sports drinks or whatever.
“And I started to realize that if I could make a really great tasting NA beer, anything under 2% ABV actually rehydrates you,” he continued.
The research-and-development process to create Strapless IPA was also born out of Kaczeus’ favorite hobbies: enjoying live music in Bootstrap’s taproom. With a test batch of Strapless IPA on tap, he drank pint after pint, using a breathalyzer to check his blood alcohol content between each beer. After six pints, his BAC was 0.00, so he drove home and headed out for a run.
Strapless IPA is modeled after Bootstrap’s Lush Puppy IPA, a 6.3% ABV hazy offering. The next iteration of the non-alcoholic line will be a golden ale to “go on both ends of the spectrum,” Kaczeus said.
“I’m working on the golden ale now, going through the iterative process because I want to make sure that it tastes really good, that it’s something I want to drink” he said. “I have a palate that, if I like it, I know that a lot of people will like it. It will take me a little bit of time, but I’ll get it.”
Year-to-date through early September, off-premise dollar sales of non-alcoholic beer has increased 38.5%, to $150.4 million, according to market research firm Nielsen. Heineken 0.0 leads the segment, with $36.2 million in sales at multi-outlet grocery, mass retail and convenience stores through September 6, according to market research firm IRI.
As major players such as Heineken 0.0 open the door for non-alcoholic beer adoption, craft brewers such as Bootstrap and Stratford, Connecticut-based Athletic Brewing, which only produces non-alcoholic beers, have the ability to offer drinkers a variety of styles. Kaczeus envisions retailers wanting to provide several non-alc choices once consumers’ palates develop further.
“Even if it’s not on draft, they may have cans, just like they did O’Douls — they probably have Heineken 0.0 stashed in a cooler at a bar,” he said. “As more and more craft breweries get involved, I think it’s going to become more popular.”
Strapless IPA will bring new consumers into Bootstrap’s fold, co-founder and marketing lead Leslie Kaczeus added.
“This is a complete new market for us,” she said. “One of the things that intrigues us is not only the people that are choosing not to drink alcohol for whatever reason, it’s the health and athletic component to it.”
To introduce the product to drinkers, Bootstrap recently began scheduling tastings at off-premise retailers, which had been paused during the pandemic.
“The store owners are feeling more comfortable scheduling those,” Leslie Kaczeus said. “I want this to get into people’s hands and want them tasting it, because that’s the easiest way to sell a product, when they say ‘Oh my gosh, this doesn’t taste like the other products that I’ve had.’”
Steve Kaczeus envisions the Strapless non-alc series becoming as much as 5% of Bootstrap’s volume, which increased 10% last year, to 7,014 barrels, according to Brewers Association (BA) data.
In August, Oskar Blues founder Dale Katechis, a friend of the Kaczeuses through their children’s baseball team, acquired a minority stake in Bootstrap and serves as an advisor.
“When they opened Bootstrap, I was obviously intrigued,” he said. “There are so many things that conjured up memories of how Oskar Blues was started — we were always scrappy, funding the thing through cash advance checks and laying it all on our credit cards.
“I loved their mentality and they’re just great people,” he continued. “I was starting to look for another project and I loved the smallness of what they’re doing, and they’ve got great plans and they make exceptional beer.”
Katechis and the Kaczeuses meet regularly to discuss strategy and operations, and he shares his wisdom gleaned from his experience starting a craft brewery from the ground up.
“Pardon my French, but I tell them your job right now is to not F this thing up,” he said. “It’s easy to do at this stage because you can get your hands in so many things and you can stop focusing on what’s really important, which is the beer, the culture and the people that are there.”
Katechis finds the Strapless series and other non-alcoholic craft beers “exciting, mainly because the beer that we’re making is good.” He pointed to occasions from a life spent in the beer industry as examples of the necessity of non-alc craft beer, such as lunch meetings with distributors.
“It’s more appropriate, at least for me, to have a non-alcoholic beer for lunch — it still gives you that social outlet,” Katechis said. “Usually, to be honest, my one beer lunches turned into two beer lunches and then your day changes and it’s nice to have a good beer and have that social bond and not have a buzz and really get to enjoy that.”