Founder of UK’s favourite alcohol free beer: ‘I’m mindful of talking about alcoholism and addiction’
Lucky Saint is Britain’s favourite alcohol free beer. Its founder on how they became a success, the future of flavour in low-and-no and why he’s mindful of talking about addiction
Look at it from the outside and the Lucky Saint pub in Fitzrovia looks like any other boozer, with its traditional facade and its name emblazoned in a period gold typeface. But go in for a pint on a busy evening and you might notice the vibe is slightly different. Perhaps slightly less charged than your average boozer.
Named in homage to the alcohol free beer of the same name, fifteen percent of drinkers in the venue swerve the hard stuff for the type of drink you can drive after (that’s compared with the average of one percent of beers sold being alcohol free in pubs country-wide).
The Lucky Saint pub does sell full-strength beers and other alcoholic drinks, but their message is around choice: that everyone should be able to find something interesting to drink even if they’re remaining rigidly on the wagon.
The Lucky Saint success story goes like this: founder Luke Boase wanted to find the type of alcohol free beer he’d actually want to drink. Meaning one with great flavour. Around ten years ago, he employed six different breweries in three countries to search for a decent enough nectar that felt convincingly like the real deal. In 2020 they launched their lager on draft, and in 2023 put out an IPA. While you might not want three or four Lucky Saints, one or two are a decent replacement for full-strength beer if you’re having a night off, or doing some trendy ‘zebra striping’, the new fashionable activity of mixing alcohol free with full-strength drinks.
Lucky Saint founder: Going alcohol free become incredibly influential
This Dry January their ‘Thou Shalt Go To The Pub’ campaign is spreading the message that socialising needn’t hinge on drinking. “Lucky Saint’s belief is the greatest reward of drinking is the social connection,” says founder Luke Boane. “Drinking is about being together with people: family, friends, colleagues, that’s what makes alcohol free so exciting. It means we can provide great choices.” The website’s Tap Map locates all the London pubs serving Lucky Saint on tap and Boane says that has been an incredible business move: groups of drinkers are led to pubs that serve alcohol free on tap by the non-drinker friends. “The non drinker has become incredibly influential,” he says.
Brewed over six weeks in the same style as ordinary beer, Lucky Saint has taken Guinness Zero on to become one of the most popular independent alcohol free beers in the UK, and certainly the most commonly found on tap in pubs (Boane is passionate about the British emotional attachment to having a pint).
There are over 1,400 companies brewing alcohol free beer in the UK. How does it feel to have stood above the competition? “Pretty good!” laughs Boase, talking to City AM in a room above the pub on a busy Tuesday night in January. “I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on that stuff. There’s always more to do. We think we can grow three, four or five times, quadruple our market share. We’ve got tons of room to grow our share and the category itself has tons of room to grow.”
We don’t sell alcohol, so we’re fortunate…
The UK’s alcohol free market is expected to grow by 7% year on year between 2022 and 2026, and sales of low and no-alcohol beer have grown by more than double since 2019. Boase comes across as a reserved and pragmatic business leader and the sort of man you believe could see all of this growth coming. “The pub has been through lots of evolutions over the years, they’re now more reliant on food as a core proposition versus thirty years ago when the vast majority were wet led. Everything continues to evolve and now there’s a big evolution in the way we’re drinking. Pubs are reacting really well in terms of serving up better choices.”
Boase says he hears “amazing stories” about the “very deep, positive impact” Lucky Saint’s had on people’s lives. “There’s a group of five people downstairs, two of them are having a pint of Lucky Saint and it’s not even a thing. The fact it’s not even a thing is the success of where the category has come to; how normal it has become. If you wound back about five years, that wasn’t a socially acceptable thing to do. You’d have to apologise to your mate if you turned up and said ‘sorry I’m not drinking.’ We’ve come an enormous distance to a place where it’s totally fine, it’s not even something you need to comment on.”
Surely people are still drinking too much? “There is further to go, one hundred percent,” concedes Boase. “There is still a stigma around not drinking for certain groups of people, men of certain ages, all of that stuff. It still exists, but honestly I remember trying to give samples to consumers in 2019 outside Sainsbury’s and it was challenging to get people to even take a sample. To think where we were then to where we are now – the world is changing so quickly.”
Boase believes the future of drinking is bars having a prominence of choice of both alcohol free and full-strength products. He remembers starting out in 2016 and facing hostility from venues who couldn’t comprehend the idea of stocking a variety of alcohol free drinks. “The pushback would be ‘we have an alcohol free beer so why would we have another one?’” But most of those products were bad.
He believes today “it’s as challenging as it’s ever been” for new companies trying to break into the market, but the positive news for entrepreneurs is that the market is growing. His advice to newcomers is to emulate the quality of Lucky Saint. “Create a great product, strong brand and build amazing relationships. Build them one by one, get listed one by one, build credibility with small groups and then go to slightly bigger groups, work your way up the distribution tree.”
For an industry leading alcohol free expert it is puzzling that Boase can only name one other alcohol free brand, and Boase hasn’t heard of Torstig, the alcohol free pop-up that sold out every night in January 2024. Like many entrepreneurs, he’s clearly focussed on tending to his own patch. Ultimately, Boanes says much of his research is done by sitting in his own pub, witnessing the effect Lucky Saint has had on London drinkers.
He won’t comment on the scourge of alcoholism in the city (the Alcohol Change charity believes there’s around 600,000 dependant drinkers in the UK) “I’d be pretty mindful of delving into the arena of alcoholism and addiction. The vast majority of our customers drink Lucky Saint as part of a healthy drinking relationship.” – but acknowledges that his brand has become a safe space for people from all walks of life. “We’re there to provide great choices to people but we don’t sell alcohol so we’re fortunate that we don’t operate in that arena.”
“What we see in the pub is on a day to day basis just how normal it’s become,” he concludes. “There are amazing stories that we hear on the very deep positive impact it’s had on people’s lives.”
Go to Luckysaint.co