I decided a while back to stop drinking, it was becoming too easy to relax with a beer, palinka and/or whiskey every night. My alcohol-free days have left my drink options rather limited. I wasn't interested in drinking fizzy drinks and/or fruit juices as they have a very high sugar/calorie count. Tea/coffee are great but the caffeine content is high so you can't really drink them after 5pm. So my life was about to get boring until I read about Olympic athletes who down liters of Alcohol-free beer pre,during and post activities. Looking further into it, alcohol-free beer is low calorie, isotonic and full of lots of healthy things. There is only one problem in my mind, the taste. My earliest memory of alcohol-free beer was a Kaliber, brewed by Guinness and it was foul. It made Fosters look like a drink of the Gods.

Undaunted, I've been working my way through the rather wide range of alcohol-free beers in Hungary, which mainly exist due to Hungary's Zero tolerance to alcohol and driving. The majority of the beers were as foul as my memory lead me to believe. Some are understandable as they are only 125 HUF (35p) from the ultracheap German supermarkets and passable/semi-enjoyable as wheat-based drink but definitely not a beer!

My favourite beer of the moment is Soprani which tastes like an IPA! I was generally shocked to try a beer which has a nice flavour and is surprisingly beer like -- All this for 60p for 500 ml. A close-second was Heineken's attempt which is just like a lager (I'm just not a lager fan)