Editing Low-alcohol beer (section)

===Near beer===
[[File:Tourtel Nearbeer.JPG|thumb|left|upright=.68|Tourtel, a near-beer which has 0.4% [[ABV]]]]
"Near beer" was a term for [[malt beverage]]s containing little or no alcohol (less than 0.5% ABV), which were mass-marketed during [[Prohibition in the United States]]. Near beer could not legally be labeled as "beer" and was officially classified as a "[[cereal]] beverage".<ref>{{Cite web|title=Kansas Department of Revenue - About the Department |url=https://www.ksrevenue.gov/404.html |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20070117070410/http://www.ksrevenue.org/abchistory.htm |archivedate=17 January 2007|website=www.ksrevenue.gov}}</ref> 

The most popular "near beer" was [[Bevo (beverage)|Bevo]], brewed by the [[Anheuser-Busch]] company. The [[Pabst Brewing Company|Pabst]] company brewed "Pablo", [[Miller Brewing|Miller]] brewed "Vivo", and [[Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company|Schlitz]] brewed "Famo". Many local and regional breweries stayed in business by marketing their own near-beers. By 1921, production of near beer had reached over 300 million US gallons (1 billion L) a year (36 L/s).

A popular illegal practice was to add alcohol to near beer. The resulting beverage was known as ''spiked beer'' or ''needle beer'',<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.beerhistory.com/library/holdings/prohibition_1.shtml|title=We Want Beer: National Prohibition, Part 1}}</ref> so called because a needle was used to inject alcohol through the cork of the bottle or keg.

Food critic and writer [[Waverley Root]] described the common American near beer as "such a wishy-washy, thin, ill-tasting, discouraging sort of slop that it might have been dreamed up by a [[Puritan]] [[Niccolò Machiavelli|Machiavelli]] with the intent of disgusting drinkers with genuine beer forever."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.americanheritage.com/beer-and-america|title=Beer And America|website=AMERICAN HERITAGE}}</ref>

In the early 2010s, major breweries began experimenting with mass-market non-alcoholic beers to counter with declining alcohol consumption amid growing preference for craft beer, launching beverages like Anheuser-Busch's Budweiser Prohibition Brew, launched in 2016.

A drink similar to "near beer", "bjórlíki" was quite popular in Iceland before alcoholic beer was made legal in 1989. The Icelandic variant normally consisted of a shot of vodka added to a half-a-litre glass of light beer.