Bellwoods Brewery

Bellwoods Brewery runs two adjoining spaces on Ossington Avenue in Toronto's Trinity-Bellwoods/Little Portugal area: a full-service brewpub at 124 Ossington Ave, open Mon-Tue 5pm-midnight, Wed-Thu noon-midnight, Fri-Sat noon-1am and Sun noon-11pm, and a retail bottle shop next door at 126 Ossington Ave. Both carry the brewery's own non-alcoholic beer line, sold through Bellwoods' dedicated Non-Alc collection alongside its regular beers.

The flagship is 0.5%, a 473mL non-alcoholic beer that began, in the brewery's own telling, as an internal joke during Dry January before turning into a real project: "what initially started as a joke inside our brewery, back in Dry January, quickly became a fun side project." The current iteration is described by Bellwoods as having "beautiful hop aromatics, light ice-tea-like flavours, and a spritzy body" — occupying a middle ground the brewery calls "kind of like beer, kind of not."

Co-founder Luke Pestl has said the NA beers are made using controlled, stopped fermentation rather than dealcoholization — equipment the brewery doesn't have — framing the line as a natural extension of Bellwoods' long-running interest in low-ABV brewing: "Low-alcohol beers have long been an interest of ours...NA is really just an extension of that program." He's described the development process as thorough, involving repeated test batches, recipe revisions and taste tests. "If I had to distill it down to one point," he told Some Good Clean Fun in 2023, "I'd say that our NA beers taste just like beer beer."

Beyond the 0.5%, the non-alcoholic range includes the dry-hopped Stay Classy IPA with citrus and grapefruit notes, and several NA riffs on Bellwoods' Jelly King sour: a Dry Hopped Sour with raspberry and blackberry (under 0.5% ABV, tart with peachy notes), a Tangerine, Ginger and Lemon variant, and two Jelly King seltzers — Raspberry Lemon and Tangerine Grapefruit.