What beer are we drinking this week? Episode 3

Got a can of Never Drinking Again 0.5% IPA from Whiplash.... Last one in stock in Martins.

I was impressed at how good it is, has the same hop taste, odour and colouring as many of their other beers.

Best low alcohol beer of 2025 for me, worth paying a wee premium for.

I don't have a strong view on this idea that craft beer (let's say Irish craft beers) are more hangover-inducing than imported German beers. Certainly heard it a few times.

From personal experience, I suppose that I've ended up hungover by drinking both, and I'm struggle to say that any difference wasn't down to the volume of beer consumed on a given evening, and the alcohol content by volume.

I'm not saying it's true of you, but a lot of people do seem to fail to struggle to account for ABV. They'll drink 3 pints of Heineken at a 4.3% ABV, and the next day they are "totally fine"…. Then if they drink 3 pints of Kinnegar Scraggy Bay the next time, they report they're "not great" the next day, compared to the Heineken, and they conclude that craft beer gives you feeling worse. …Except the Scraggy Bay is 5.3% ABV, which is a decent uplift in alcohol content.

Bit of a side story, but reminds me of something that happened at Harry Byrnes, Clontarf, when they introduced craft taps. They had 8 Degrees Full Irish on top at one stage, and one of the oul lads tried it, decided he liked it, and had his usual number of pints. Except no one told him it was 6% ABV, and he ended up practically falling off his chair.

In the case Irish craft beer and German imported beer, I think if I drank an equal volume of each, I'd expect the different in hangover to not be significantly different, if I controlled for ABV.

But equalising for ABV, could there be anything else that accounts for why one kind of beer versus another might result in a worse hangover?

I think, potentially, it could be related to the degree to which a given drink is inflammatory for you. All alcohol can cause systemic inflammation but as far as I gather, they're not all equal, and it's individual. Some types of alcohol, like red wine, have modest anti-oxidant effects that theoretically should reduce inflammation, but the reality is that it's individual, and some people aren't tolerant of red wine in particular, if they're histamine intolerant. The issue of gluten in alcohol is another one that's potentially very significant, but comes down to individual tolerance again… I don't generally have any kind of negative reaction to alcohol made with grain, barley etc. but there are people who are going to have better experiences with gluten-free options.

That's interesting. As you note, not much discrepancy in ABV there, they're more or less like-for-like.