How much alcohol is in beer?

Beer styles have fixed ranges in percent by volume, from about 4.3 percent for weizen to 12 percent for imperial stout.

The style guidelines of the Beer Judge Certification Program give a range per style. Pils is at 4.4 to 5.2 percent by volume and weizen at 4.3 to 5.6 percent by volume. Bock is higher, at 6.3 to 7.2 percent by volume.

In the Belgian family it goes higher. Blond sits at 6 to 7.5 percent by volume, dubbel at 6 to 7.6 and tripel at 7.5 to 9.5. The heavy dark Belgians, the group that includes quadrupel, sit at 8 to 12 percent by volume. Imperial stout keeps the same limits: 8 to 12 percent by volume.

Alcohol-free and low-alcohol beer fall outside that classification, because their limit is laid down in Dutch law and not in a style guideline. A brewery is, incidentally, not bound to a range: a style guideline describes what is customary, the label gives the actual percentage of that bottle.

Alcohol-free beer may contain at most 0.1 percent alcohol by volume in the Netherlands, and low-alcohol beer more than 0.1 and at most 1.2 percent by volume.

Those two designations are set out in the Warenwetbesluit Gereserveerde aanduidingen (Dutch Commodities Act decree on reserved designations). Article 7c deals with alcohol-free beer, article 7d with low-alcohol beer. Both articles also require the extract content of the original wort to be at least 4 percent.

So the word alcohol-free does not mean zero. An alcohol-free beer may contain a trace of alcohol, up to 0.1 percent by volume. Anyone who wants to know exactly what is in a bottle reads the label.

For beer up to and including 5.5 percent by volume, the actual content may deviate from the label by 0.5 percentage points, and above 5.5 percent by volume it is 1 percentage point.

That deviation is set out in Annex XII of EU Regulation 1169/2011. A pils with 5.0 percent on the label may therefore come out between 4.5 and 5.5 percent by volume. For a tripel with 8.5 percent on the label, 7.5 to 9.5 percent by volume is allowed.

The same regulation states that the percentage is given to at most one decimal, followed by the designation % vol, optionally preceded by the word alcohol or the abbreviation alc. The content is determined at 20 degrees Celsius.

The statement itself is mandatory above 1.2 percent by volume. A beer below that does not have to put the percentage on the label, and that is why light beers sometimes show no number.

A 250 millilitre glass of pilsner with 5 percent alcohol by volume contains 12.5 millilitres of pure alcohol.

The calculation is volume times percentage. A 200 millilitre flute of 5 percent by volume pils comes to 10 millilitres of alcohol. A 330 millilitre bottle of tripel at 8.5 percent by volume comes to almost 28 millilitres, well over twice as much from less liquid.

With alcohol-free beer little remains. A 330 millilitre bottle at 0.1 percent by volume contains 0.33 millilitres of alcohol. A low-alcohol beer of 1.2 percent by volume in the same bottle comes to almost 4 millilitres.

The age limit of 18 applies to drink with more than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume, because from that point the Alcoholwet calls a drink alcoholic.

Article 1 of the Alcoholwet defines alcoholic drink as a drink that consists of more than half a percent alcohol by volume at twenty degrees Celsius. Article 20 prohibits supplying it to anyone who has not been established to be 18 years or older.

Daarom vragen wij om een identiteitsbewijs als wij twijfelen over de leeftijd. NIX18: geen alcohol onder de 18 jaar. Hebt u vragen over een bierstijl of over een percentage op een etiket, dan kunt u ons bellen of langskomen in de winkel aan de Brink in Bathmen.