The ABV Atlas

Welcome to the shallow end. Everything in this band sits between nothing at all and nine-tenths of one percent. The faintest trace of alcohol a beer can carry and still arguably be seen as beer. These are the Wisps - drinks that flicker at the very edge of the thing that makes beer beer. All the flavour and ritual with barely any of the effect.

Nought-point-nothing to nought-point-nine

It's a narrow band hiding a surprising quantity of disagreement. Different countries draw their lines in different places, so a single beer can be "alcohol-free" in one market and "de-alcoholised" in another. Broadly, a true 0.0% is the genuine article, nothing detectable, 0.5% is the threshold most of the world treats as alcohol-free... roughly the trace you'd find in a (very!) ripe banana or slice of fresh bread. By the time you reach 0.9% you're at the top of the band, where a few low-alcohol beers start to show real body. England's own labelling rules for these have been under review in recent years, so the wording on the can is worth reading and you shouldn't assume.

Why it's the hardest beer to brew well

Alcohol isn't just the point of beer, as it's it's structural. Ethanol has aroma, gives sweetness and warmth and also gives the liquid weight in the mouth. Take it out and you're left fighting thinness and a tendency to thin, worty, cereal-sweet flavours. Brewers get around this though...

• Arrested fermentation: stopping the yeast early, before it makes much alcohol.
• Specialist yeasts which can't ferment the main sugars in wort, so they build flavour without much alcohol.
• Removing the alcohol afterward, by light vacuum distillation or pushing the finished beer through a fine membrane (reverse osmosis).

Each leaves its own fingerprint, which is half the fun of tasting across this band - you're often tasting a technique as much as a recipe. Generous late hopping and dry-hopping do much of the heavy lifting to put back the aroma the missing alcohol would have carried.

A category that grew up fast

Not long ago this shelf was a punishment, but no longer - the wider world now has good things living down here, with the likes of Lucky Saint, Big Drop, Athletic and Guinness's own 0.0. The quality floor has risen sharply. Those beers sit outside this collection's numbers below, but they're worth seeking out if the Wisps catch your interest.

Below is whatever Hop Horizons has actually logged in this range, ranked and broken down strength by strength. For a band this faint, even a handful of beers tells a story.