What is alcohol-free gin?

No. In the European Union, gin is a protected legal designation that may only be used for a distillate of at least 37.5 percent alcohol, flavoured with juniper berries.

Article 10(7) of Regulation (EU) 2019/787 prohibits the use of such legal names for drinks that do not meet the requirements. The Court of Justice of the European Union confirmed this on 13 November 2025 in case C-563/24, between Verband Sozialer Wettbewerb and PB Vi Goods. The Court ruled that additions such as alcohol-free or 0.0 do not lift the prohibition, citing consumer protection, transparency and fair competition as the reason. Making and selling the drink itself remains permitted; only the name is not allowed.

Juniper berries and other herbs and spices, steeped in water and then distilled or macerated, without any alcohol ever being formed.

Producers use techniques from the distillery for this. Botanicals are steeped in water per type, heated and distilled, after which the separate distillates are blended. Copper pot distillation is also used, the same method as for real gin, as well as maceration as in winemaking. The production cycle can take six weeks. An important difference from alcohol-free wine and alcohol-free beer: with most alcohol-free distilled alternatives no alcohol is removed, because alcohol is never formed.

Real gin is agricultural ethanol flavoured with juniper berries and contains at least 37.5 percent alcohol; in the alcohol-free alternative that ethanol is completely absent.

Within the regulation there are three gin variants, each with its own requirements: gin, distilled gin and London gin. All three must have at least 37.5 percent alcohol. London gin is the strictest: it may contain at most 0.1 gram of sweetener per litre. A spirit drink in general must, according to Article 2, contain at least 15 percent alcohol. In the alcohol-free alternative, water carries the flavourings instead of alcohol, which changes how the flavour builds and how it feels in the mouth.

Your own product name with a clear description is allowed, as long as the protected designation gin does not appear in it, not even in combination with words like style or flavour.

Lawyers advise choosing a name that the consumer understands without explanation, that describes the drink and that does not resemble a protected designation. In practice you see descriptions that refer to the herbs or to use in a long drink, alongside the alcohol percentage. The regulation does not prohibit making or selling the drink; the prohibition only concerns the use of the legal designation.

In the Netherlands a drink only counts as alcoholic when at twenty degrees Celsius it consists of more than half a percent by volume of alcohol. Many alcohol-free alternatives are well below that.

For beer there is a reserved designation in the Netherlands: alcohol-free beer may contain at most 0.1 percent alcohol by volume, low-alcohol beer more than 0.1 and at most 1.2 percent by volume. For alcohol-free distilled alternatives no such national designation exists. The percentage on the label is therefore the only hard information you have. Strong spirits, according to the Alcoholwet (Dutch Alcohol Act), is anything with 15 percent by volume or more, wine excepted.

In 2022, 0.5 percent of Dutch adults drank alcohol-free spirits monthly. Alcohol-free beer was much higher at 16 percent, alcohol-free wine at 1 percent.

Those figures come from the Leefstijlmonitor, for which in 2022 between thirty-nine hundred and almost ten thousand adults aged 18 and over were surveyed; in that year it concerned 9,796 people. Alcohol-free spirits are thus the smallest of the three categories, but the supply is growing fast. The study does note that respondents do not always distinguish between 0.0 percent and drinks with a small trace of alcohol.