Last updated: September 2006

The following question was submitted to John Roska, an attorney/writer whose weekly newspaper column, "Q&A: The Law," runs in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Illinois Edition) and the Champaign News Gazette.

Question

Can minors buy and drink non-alcoholic beer?

Answer

Yes. If it's got less than 0.5% alcohol, it's not covered by the Illinois Liquor Control Act. Technically, then, it's not beer, so calling it non-alcoholic beer is oxymoronic. That's why the label says "beverage" and not "beer."

Both Federal and Illinois law define beer as "ale, porter, stout, and other similar fermented beverages (including sake or similar products) of any name or description containing one-half of one percent or more of alcohol by volume, brewed or produced from malt, wholly or in part, or from any substitute for malt."

Similarly, the Illinois Liquor Control Act says its definition of "alcoholic liquor" does NOT include "any liquid or solid containing one-half of one per cent, or less, of alcohol by volume."

Because the Liquor Control Act prohibits the sale or delivery of "alcoholic liquor to any person under the age of 21 years," it doesn't apply to the sale of anything below the 0.5% alcohol threshold.

So, anybody can buy and drink non-alcoholic brew in Illinois. You can't in Pennsylvania, which recently passed a law to prohibit the sales of non-alcoholic beverages to minors. Other states may have similar prohibitions.

But, with up to 0.5% alcohol, "non-alcoholic" drinks still have some alcohol. Under Illinois law, only "alcohol free" drinks are totally 0%. "Low alcohol" drinks contain between 0.5% and 2.5% alcohol, which almost all light" (lower calorie) beers exceed. Budweiser, by comparison, has 4.7% alcohol.

Since "non-alcoholic" drinks do contain alcohol, it's conceivable that someone who'd had a few could register a positive result on a breathalyzer test. I'm told, for example, that a dose of cough medicine can. Under the state's "zero tolerance" laws, any positive breath test can cause problems for a minor operating a vehicle.

Violating the 0.08% blood-alcohol under Illinois law would be hard--a 150-pound person would apparently have to drink a whole case of non-alcoholic brew (24 bottles) in one hour to do that. But it wouldn't necessarily take a lot, especially with a smaller person, to produce something more than zero.

If you're going to worry about how an O'Doul's, with its 0.4% alcohol content, will show up on a breath test, you should also know that orange juice can have an alcohol content between 0.2% and 0.5%. At least that's what an Indiana University web site says, which contains lots of interesting info on this subject: www.drugs.indiana.edu.

President Bush drinks an occasional O'Doul's. Back during prohibition, when only 0.5% "beer" was legal, breweries switched to "non-alcoholic" drinks, although consumption steadily dropped until repeal. Anheuser-Busch made Bevo, which Professor Harold Hill mentions as a possible cause of trouble in River City. Today, Bevo survives as the name of the University of Texas longhorn mascot.

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