Halfway Crooks Beer

Halfway Crooks Beer opened in summer 2019 at 60 Georgia Avenue SE in Summerhill, founded by Andrew Bainbridge, a career engineer and longtime homebrewer, and Joran Van Ginderachter, a Belgian-trained brewer. The brewing is deliberately traditional — lagers, pilsners and mixed-fermentation Belgian-influenced beers, executed patiently in a market that mostly rewards the opposite. The site runs across a cosy bier café and bar, an open-air rooftop called the Dak Bar, and the HC Biergarten a few streets away on Reed Street; the rooftop and biergarten are both dog-friendly.

For non-drinkers the draw is Brevet Pils, the brewery's own non-alcoholic German-style pilsner, brewed under 0.5% ABV with notes of subtle fennel, oyster crackers, lemon and tangerine. A pilsner is the hardest possible style to make without alcohol. There is nothing to hide behind — no hop bitterness, no roast, no fruit — so every flaw in a de-alcoholised beer shows up immediately. Attempting one is a statement of confidence, and Brevet is now distributed in six-packs well beyond Atlanta.

Co-owner Shawn Cooper described the difficulty to Atlanta Magazine in 2025: it is not really beer so much as a hybrid, and the process requires heating the product and pasteurising it for shelf stability. That is an honest account of a category most breweries market as effortless. Arresting fermentation before the alcohol develops, then stabilising the result without cooking the flavour out of it, is a technical problem, and it is why so few independent breweries make their own NA beer instead of buying it in.

The brewery pours Monday to Thursday from 4pm, and from late morning at weekends. Between this and Wild Heaven a couple of miles west, Atlanta has two independent breweries making credible house non-alcoholic beer — which is two more than most American cities of its size.