May you buy alcohol-free beer if you are under eighteen?

Alcohol-free beer of half a percent by volume or less falls outside the Alcohol Act, so there is no legal age limit of 18 for it.

The Alcohol Act defines an alcoholic drink as a drink that, at a temperature of twenty degrees Celsius, consists of more than half a percent by volume of alcohol. Beer of 0.0% or 0.5% stays below that. Article 20 of the same law prohibits supplying alcoholic drinks to anyone who has not been established to be eighteen, so that provision does not concern alcohol-free beer. Watch the labelling: beer sold as low-alcohol but coming in above half a percent by volume does fall under the law.

When in doubt we ask for ID, because cans and bottles of alcohol-free beer can hardly be told apart from the alcoholic version at the till.

At the counter it has to be clear at a glance what goes through the till. The labels of the alcohol-free and the regular version often look very similar, and a mistake is a breach of the Alcohol Act. That is why we keep to one rule in Bathmen: if someone does not unmistakably look eighteen or older, we ask for ID, even for an alcohol-free beer. The law allows that question to be skipped for anyone who has unmistakably reached the required age, but that judgement is ours to make.

NIX18 is de campagne van het ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport met een enkele boodschap: geen alcohol voor kinderen onder de 18.

The campaign addresses both parents and young people and stresses that parents' attitude has a great influence on children's drinking behaviour. On alcohol-free drinks, the line is set out in the National Prevention Agreement: alcohol-free beer is not intended for young people under 18, and advertising for it is not aimed at minors. These are agreements between the government and other parties, not law. For a seller it means that alcohol-free beer is not a children's drink.

The Trimbos-instituut mentions a possible gateway effect, but stresses that there is not yet enough research to establish this with certainty.

The idea behind it is that young people get used to the taste of beer through the alcohol-free version, making the step to the alcoholic version smaller. The Trimbos-instituut points to research showing that young people who drank alcohol in the past month used alcohol-free drinks almost four times as often as young people who did not drink alcohol. Whether one causes the other has not been shown by this. Parents and young people see this differently: young people recognise the effect of advertising more often than adults.

The law does not prohibit it, because alcohol-free beer falls outside the Alcohol Act, but the National Prevention Agreement advises against it for young people under 18.

Wat er thuis op tafel komt, bepalen ouders zelf. Wat de overheid ervan vindt, staat in het preventieakkoord: alcoholvrije dranken zijn niet bedoeld voor jongeren onder de 18 jaar. De NIX18-campagne legt daarbij de nadruk op het voorbeeld dat ouders geven. Voor alcoholhoudende drank ligt het antwoord wel hard: verstrekken aan wie nog geen achttien is, is verboden.