The Office for National Statistics announced yesterday that alcohol-free beer has been added to the UK inflation basket for 2026.

This is the list of 760 items the ONS uses to track how much things cost in Britain. It's how they calculate the CPI. Bread is on there. Petrol. Electricity. Netflix, since 2019. And now, as of this year, AF beer.

I found out from the Guardian while eating toast and I will admit to feeling a small, probably disproportionate sense of personal validation.¹

* * *

The reason the ONS gave is that sales have increased and shelf space has expanded. Which is the statistician's way of saying: enough people are buying this stuff that it now affects the national cost of living. Not a fad. Not a January thing. A permanent line item in how Britain measures its economy.

Alongside AF beer, the basket also added hummus, motorhomes, dashboard cameras, and pet grooming. The Telegraph called it a reflection of "healthier lifestyle choices." The Reuters headline mentioned "healthy habits reshaping the UK basket." Danni Hewson from AJ Bell said competition has pushed brewers to make more "quaffable choices."

I appreciate the word quaffable. I'm not sure anyone under 50 has ever used it, but it does the job.

* * *

What's interesting to me, as someone who has spent the last few months drinking a frankly unreasonable number of different alcohol-free beers, is that the timing feels right but the story is bigger than the headlines suggest.

The headlines make it sound like AF beer just arrived. In reality, the shift has been building for years. What happened recently is that the good AF beers arrived. The ones that don't taste like someone brewed disappointment and carbonated it. The ones you actually look forward to opening at 7pm on a Wednesday.

Five years ago, your options were basically Heineken 0.0, Beck's Blue, and whatever Tesco had on the bottom shelf with a label that screamed "you have made a sad choice." The category existed, but nobody was excited about it.

Now? I've got a spreadsheet. I've done a proper comparison. There are functional beers with adaptogens and nootropics. There are craft AF beers that beer nerds genuinely rate. There are enough options that I had to write a five-way showdown just to sort through them.

The ONS adding AF beer to the basket isn't the beginning of a trend. It's the government statisticians finally noticing what people like me have been doing for months.

* * *

Here's the number that got me, though: 25% of Britons now say they don't drink alcohol at all. GB News reported that. One in four. And that's not counting the people who still drink but are cutting back, which by most surveys is another 30-40% of the population.

That's a lot of people looking for something to drink on a Tuesday evening that isn't water, isn't Ribena, and doesn't require them to explain themselves at the pub.²

My personal answer to that question has been IMPOSSIBREW, which I've written about enough that my wife asked if I was "being sponsored." I'm not. I just genuinely think it's the best thing in the category, and I find it slightly annoying that I care this much about a non-alcoholic lager.

But that's what the ONS basket thing confirms, really. It's not weird any more. It's not a lifestyle choice that requires explanation. It's just... what a statistically significant number of British people drink now. Like hummus. Or dashboard cameras, apparently.

* * *

The part the ONS didn't mention, because they're statisticians and not lifestyle columnists, is what this means for the quality of the options available. More demand means more competition means better products. The AF beers coming out now are categorically better than what existed even two years ago. The functional category specifically, where you get things like ashwagandha and L-theanine alongside your lager, barely existed before 2023.

I wrote a comparison of the main functional AF beers if you want to see where the category is now. Short version: some of them are genuinely excellent and some of them are still catching up. But the overall direction is obvious, and the ONS just put a statistical stamp on it.

I'm going to crack an IMPOSSIBREW and celebrate the fact that my Tuesday evening habit is now part of the national cost of living. The government is literally tracking what I spend on beer. If that's not mainstream acceptance, I don't know what is.

If you want to try what I've been drinking, I've got a refer-a-friend link that gets you £10 off your first order. I get £10 credit too, which funds more of these experiments. Seemed worth mentioning.