Why does one have to be 21 to buy O’Doul’s (Anheuser-Busch’s non-alcoholic beer)?
If it is a specific law, imagine Coke made one alcoholic beverage. Would one have to be 21 to buy coke products?
Thanks
It’s legal for minors to purchase non-alcoholic beer in most states. Some states, such as PA, have some pretty whacky alcohol laws. Why? No idea.
Thanks, x-ray vision.
Had I read Google and/or Wiki, I would’ve also found that drinks containing up to half of 1% of alcohol can be called Non-alcoholic beverages.
Nevada, which has some of the loosest alcohol laws in the nation, prohibits minors from buying nonalcoholic beers. Not sure why - I’d imagine it has something to do with glorifying drinking.
~Tasha
Well, whenever I see an alcoholic beer the label says “Less than 0.5% alcohol”. So maybe that tiny bit is the reason?
Of course that should read “non-alcoholic beer”
I would guess that it’s because cops don’t normally carry hydrometers around to confirm the alcohol content of the beery smelling substance that the teenager is swilling out of the O’Doul’s bottle. And asking the cop to taste it is just asking for trouble.
Just an anectdotal word of warning:
Adding vodka to O’Doul’s because it’s the only beer in the house because of a friend that is on painkillers because you really really want to play beirut is a BAD idea.
Are minors prohibited from buying vanilla extract, then? It’s been a while since I was a teenager, but. For that matter, how about malted barley and yeast? I mean, they are alcohol precursors. (The kids won’t be partying that night, but still…)
We used to get O’Douls at lunch in high school. We had to suck down a dozen breath mints before our next class to keep the teachers from smelling it on us. But nobody ever hassled us about buying it. This was in Illinois.
Whatever happened to Geritol ™? That was de rigeur for the drunks and winos on Sundays when blue laws prevailed. You could find them enjoying their tonic at the local drugstore, to prevent DT’s, I suppose.
Or maybe with the notion that, otherwise, if you’re caught selling regular beer to minors, you might be able to use the defense that you made a mistake and thought you were selling them O’Douls. So it’s simplest just to make beeroid illegal for minors as well.
My understanding is that “non-alcoholic” beers have some alcohol. It may only be 1/10th of 1%, but some states’ laws prohibit selling beverages with any alcohol to minors.
In PA at least there are no restrictions on selling non-beverage alcohol to minors. Extracts (along with cooking wine) are not intended to be consumed raw by humans.
Illegal in Florida because it’s a beverage and it contains alcohol. They’re better off just buying NYQUIL which isn’t a beverage and contains much more alcohol. . .
I got into a stupid semantics argument with a New York State trooper about this.
Alcohol consumption/sales were banned at certain (if not all) state parks.
I was into an “O’Douls” phase and figured it was legal to drink it at the park because it was non-alcoholic. But to be sure, I approached a trooper at Jones Beach State Park and asked him point blank if I could drink O’Douls at the beach.
He gave the “company line”; namely, “Alcoholic beverages are banned at the park”.
So, I say, “Yes sir, I know that, but what about non-alcoholic beer?”
Reply: “Alcoholic beverages are banned at the park”
This went on for 3 more iterations before I just turned my back on him and walked away shaking my head.
I’ve been carded at grocery stores multiple times for buying sparkling grape juice and non-alcoholic cider (unlike beer, it’s not cider which was fermented and then alcohol removed, but cloudy apple juice which didn’t ferment in the first place)! There it seems to be because it’s cataloged under the liquor department, and the counter jockey can’t continue the transaction without entering a birth date. To avoid potential blame down the road, the young 'uns will not exercise their own judgment and enter a bogus number (I’m sure this is drilled into them by their managers, so I don’t blame them too much) whereas the older clerks will just enter something at random or their own birthday, for all I know.
This is also in Illinois. Maybe they got chewed out for selling O’Douls to high school kids on their lunch break and cracked down. 
Also in Illinois, rather than wait for a cashier who is over 21 to come over and ring up my O’Doul’s I told the cashier that since I was pretending it was beer she could pretend she was 21. Didn’t work.
Towns have cracked down on sales to minors so much that other customers who are over 21 can no longer make the judgement call that Grandma is old enough to buy that bottle of Morgan Davis and press the “over 21” key for a minor cashier. Time was you could even do it yourself.