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Is non-alcoholic beer more common at sororities and fraternities?
The consumption of 0.0 beer has been increasing in recent years. How do fraternities and sororities look at this alcohol-free alternative? “I took an alcohol policy course with other societies and afterwards we all went out drinking.”
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Alcohol-free beer is on the rise. The industry association Nederlandse Brouwers sees the consumption of 0.0 beer increasing by more than five hundred per cent between 2010 and 2024. Due to the increased tax on non-alcoholic drinks, this increase stagnated somewhat last year, but the ambition of brewers has certainly not diminished. If it were up to the brewers‘ association, one in 10 beers drunk would have to be alcohol-free by 2030.
Traditionally, student associations have been big consumers of beer. Like the Dutch Brewers, are they warming up to the alcohol-free variant or are they sticking stubbornly to golden yellow lager with alcohol? A question for three Amsterdam student associations.
Posters at ‘the corps”
At Amsterdam’s largest student association, the A.S.C/A.V.S.V (“the corps”, 2,700 members), board members Noor Overkamp and Ariëlle Hulst are currently working on an internal campaign to make alcohol-free beer more normal within the association. Last year, in collaboration with beer brewer Heineken, alcohol-free beer was already served for free at the sorority for a while. That did not create a storm, but “more 0.0 was ordered,” observed Overkamp and Hulst.
With posters at the entrance and bar, they now want to make 0.0 more visible at the club. They also want to increase the supply of non-alcoholic drinks. So not only sell alcohol-free beer, but also, for instance, alcohol-free cocktails (so-called mocktails). Yet the two initiators are under no illusions: this action will not cause the entire corps to abandon alcoholic drinks en masse, they say, but it should create the necessary “awareness” and “facilitate” the choice for members who do not want to have a drink for a while. For example, “because they don't feel like it or have an exam week soon”, Overkamp and Hulst say.
In 2021, it came out that six sororities in the corps had been guilty of assault and humiliation during hazing, a year later women were called “sperm buckets”, among other things, in a speech. Mayor Femke Halsema in response admonished the corps to make a culture change. Whether this campaign for alcohol-free beer is a response to this, the corps would not say in so many words. But: “It is an extension of each other in the sense that we want to make people more aware of their choices, something that in turn affects their behaviour,” Overkamp and Hulst responded when asked.
Alcohol culture
Student association Cyclades (around 150 members) also wants to facilitate alcohol-free beer more among its members. There appears to be a lot of enthusiasm for this. “When we raised it in the general members” meeting, members immediately wanted to think along about which alcohol-free drinks should be available,” says board member Eduard Frederik Willem Potjer. This interest in 0.0 is mainly due to the free nature of the association, Potjer thinks. Cyclades has no expensive commitments, nor hazing. “With us, you don't have to drink yourself stove every time, so to speak.”
Still, even at Cyclades, people still drink significantly more beer with alcohol than without, Potjer observes. You won’t find alcohol-free on tap very often, he says. Sometimes there will be another drink on tap, but alcohol-free? Rarely. For that, it is still too little drunk and we have too few tap connections.”
Alcohol is deeply embedded in student culture, the umbrella body of student associations, the Amsterdam Chamber of Associations (AKvV), wrote in 2023 to their most recent covenant on alcohol and social safety - a document through which they aim to encourage responsible alcohol consumption within student associations. ‘We take that code of conduct very seriously,” says Noor Overkamp of the corps.
But this will not lead to a culture change within student associations from beer with alcohol to alcohol-free, thinks Floris Wildervanck, president of the society board of student association NoNomes (350 members). 'During the BOM weekend of the National Chamber of Societies, I attended an alcohol policy course with people from other student associations. And afterwards, we all went out drinking... That says it all, I think.”
The non-alcoholic beers at NoNomes' sorority are not exactly in great demand either, Wildervanck notices. On the contrary, in fact. ‘If we are lucky, we sell two.’ More often it is zero, he points out. ‘I once mentioned in the general members” meeting that we also sell non-alcoholic beer and then I immediately got the question: ‘Ok fine, you sell non-alcoholic beer, but do you also serve special beer with alcohol?”
