Sun King Brewery

Sun King opened in 2009 in a warehouse on North College Avenue and grew into the defining Indianapolis brewery — the one whose cans are in every corner shop in the state and whose Sunlight Cream Ale functions as the local house beer. The original downtown taproom is still on College, in the Cole-Noble commercial arts district a few blocks east of Mass Ave, and it is a working brewery floor rather than a designed bar: high ceilings, tanks visible, long tables, food trucks outside.

What earns it a place in a non-alcoholic guide is that Sun King brews the alcohol-free option itself. N/A Sunlight Cream Ale is a genuinely dealcoholised version of the flagship, kept under 0.5% ABV and produced year-round rather than as a January novelty, and it holds the malt-forward, faintly sweet character that makes the original work. In a brewery taproom the difference between that and a bought-in national NA brand is considerable: you are drinking the same beer the room is built around, poured from the same bar, at the same table, which is most of what a non-drinker actually wants in a brewery. Visit Indy's guide counts two Sun King brews reimagined without alcohol, plus guest zero-proof beers and four standing mocktails.

Two honest caveats. First, this is a brewery, and the overwhelming majority of what is poured here contains alcohol — the non-alcoholic option is real and well made, but the room is not a sober space. Second, Sun King also produces the Sun King Hemp line of hemp-derived THC seltzers in flavours including wild cherry, blood orange, blueberry and lemonade, and those are sold on the same premises. They contain no alcohol but they are intoxicating, and anyone avoiding psychoactives should read the can rather than assume that everything labelled zero-proof here is inert. The taproom opens at 11am seven days and closes between 8pm and 10pm depending on the day.