“I produced many million cases of nonalcoholic beer and spent millions of dollars trying to perfect it, and I’ll be very honest with you: I failed.”
That’s a frank assessment from Larry Sidor, cofounder and CEO at Crux Fermentation Project in Bend, Oregon. But he’s not talking about Crux’s non-alcoholic IPA, NØ MØ. He’s talking about his multiyear career at Pabst Brewing in the 1980s, where his task was to develop nonalcoholic (NA) beers. Despite ample financial and technical resources at Pabst, Sidor never managed to brew an NA beer he was proud of. He estimates he spent about $10 million on research, development, equipment, and testing.
NØ MØ, he says, is “redemption.”