Neer Beer brings suburbs’ first non-alcoholic bottle shop to Wheaton
It only stands to reason that one of the last dry towns in the suburbs would be the first to get a non-alcoholic bottle shop.
Neer Beer N/A Beverage Company opened recently in downtown Wheaton. Jason Krapausky, a longtime Wheaton resident, says his is the only 100% NA bottle shop in Illinois outside of the city of Chicago.
And if you haven’t tried NA alternatives to beer, wine and spirits in a while, they’ve come a long way, he said.
“The quality of NA in general is so good now,” he said. “I think if you’re blindfolded and tried them (with their alcoholic counterparts), you would have a difficult time picking out which one is alcoholic. If there are differences, they are negligible, except for the not getting drunk part.”
The store’s name is a play on “near beer,” a historical term for a malt beverage with a very low alcohol content. Krapausky sells non-alcoholic beer, wine, spirits and ready-to-drink mocktails. They also have a seating area where you can hang out and enjoy a non-alcoholic draft beer.
Krapausky was blunt about his motivation for opening the store.
“I was a drinker,” he said, “and I drank a little too much.”
He said stress from work — he ran stores for a supermarket chain — led him to come home and drink to help cope.
Then last year, he got cancer. He quit drinking during chemotherapy, and he’s stayed with it since.
“I really enjoy not being a drinker,” he said. “It consumes so much more of you than you think it does.”
While undergoing treatment, he said he had “a lot of time to kill.” So he started looking into the NA scene.
“I realized there’s not a lot out there,” he said. “There are a lot of people not drinking now, or cutting back at least, and a lot of demographics aren’t drinking at all.”
A Gallup poll from August showed the percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend. Previous polls by Gallup have shown that young adults have become progressively less likely to use alcohol over the past two decades.
And it’s not just for people who are looking to totally abstain from alcohol.
“There’s so many ways to look at it,” Krapausky said. “You can go 100% NA, and I know people who do that, but also others are just sober-curious who want to cut back on the amount of alcohol in what they drink.”
Many of the NA spirits mimic ingredients in alcoholic cocktails and can be mixed into a drink to lower its ABV (alcohol by volume).
“I think people look at it from a social perspective in terms of ‘Can I still hang around people, have fun and not have alcohol,’” Krapausky said. “A lot of people find that if they just have the glass in their hand with a suitable substitute, they can enjoy themselves just as much as if they’re having alcohol.”
The business at 117 W. Wesley Street occupies the lower level of a building that at one point served as a church. Krapausky applied his years of retail experience to setting up the shop and dedicating a lot of its shelf space, not surprisingly, to NA beer.
“It’s almost an apples-to-apples comparison to regular beer in terms of flavor, texture and experience,” he said.
Krapausky said ready-to-drink NA cocktails would also do very well in blind tests.
“The RTD mocktail market is huge right now,” he said. “There are so many great brands and drinks that really mimic the alcohol version of cocktails.”
The store held a soft opening on Black Friday and will celebrate with a ribbon-cutting on Wednesday, Dec. 10. It will host a free sampling event on Saturday, Dec. 13, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., with representatives from Pathfinder, Lagunitas and more showing off their wares.
Though he’s only been open a few days, Krapausky said the reaction has been very positive.
“I’ve had quite a few NA beer geeks come in and really flip out over the beer wall,” he said. “It’s great to see people get so excited about that.”
Neer Beer is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.