Athletic Brewing

Just days before Athletic Brewing's newest busy season begins—Dry January—its primary brewery, in Milford, Connecticut, is shifting into overdrive, working to fill a 30-million-can stockpile to meet the coming month's nationwide surge in demand. A majority of these six-packs will vanish from shelves within the first two weeks of 2025.

- CLINT RAINEY

The brewery—150,000 square feet crisscrossed by 45-foot-tall tanks and tubes (that look like they're out of a Super Mario game) and smelling of hops, citrus zest, and wet grain—is one of only two large dedicated non-alcoholic (NA) breweries worldwide. The other, in San Diego, also belongs to Athletic.

At many craft breweries, you'll see sandal-clad guests sampling brews while scarfing down burgers. Athletic—now America's 10th-largest craft brewery—operates a bit differently. There are no public tours, and not even a permanent taproom. It's one trade-off of being NA: not enough ethanol in the product to kill germs that sneak in with visitors. But that gives head brewer John Walker's team more room to perfect all the brews they apportion into cans: up to 460,000 per day of Run Wild IPA, Upside Dawn Golden, and other flagship offerings here on the East Coast, plus more, including many of the small-batch pilot program beers, on the West.

Strolling the production floor, Walker, who founded the company in 2018 with CEO Bill Shufelt, passes the boil kettle and whirlpool—which create flavors through heat and evaporation—and points to a giant centrifuge. Prior to its installation, Athletic could only extract 85% of the moisture from hops; this device pulls 99% of it, concentrating flavor to new levels. (The team has cut water usage in half since its early days.) When the process is complete, the hops essentially float through air “like green snow,” Walker says. The tour ends as we reach a massive tunnel pasteurizer, where cans undergo a 45-minute treatment that halts fermentation and eliminates bacteria. Athletic could technically brew regular beer here.

“We just choose not to,” Shufelt says.