Huh? *
How am I expected to irresponsibly enjoy an alcohol-free beer? By selling it to people as “the real stuff”? It’s certainly not by drinking it – you’d have to drink somewhere in excess of one-hundred and sixty-seven bottles of Beck’s Blue, for example, to get the same amount of alcohol as you’d get in one pint of 4% ABV beer (thanks, Wikipedia), and Beck’s Blue is just about the most alcoholic of the “alcohol-free” beers.
Perhaps juggling the bottles would be an irresponsible way to enjoy it. The shopkeeper certainly seemed to think so this evening.
* Beck’s Blue is an alcohol free beer, in case you didn’t know. My year-off alcohol’s going okay (now over half-way through!), by the way, although I’m developing a taste for alcohol-free things and I’m not sure that I’m permitted to maintain posession of my Y chromosome.
Yeah, we sell it at work. When I was a till jockey in Morrisons it would cause an ID check and I was told taht we had to do it as well.
Yeah, I’ve seen a few checkouts do that. I would so very be asking to speak to a manager if I got carded for alcohol-free beer, so that I could tell them to fix their checkouts!
Apparantly it’s to do with selling a product that promotes alcohol and it’s drinking, so whether that means you could get carded for, say, Guinness merchandise I know not.
@MitH: Following that logic, people should be age-checked to buy pint glasses… brewing equipment… yeast… cocktail shakers…
…well; I’ve just gone and read the relevant legislation, which basically means the Licensing Act 2003 (and wow, is that a heavy document), and small parts of the Alcoholic Liquor Duties Act 1979 (to ensure that alcohol-free beer is not defined as “beer”). As far as I can see, there’s no legislation that requires or demands that any retailer perform age checks when selling non-alcoholic beer. If anybody’s interested, the relevant sections of the Licensing Act 2003 are section 146, which defines what “sale of alcohol to children” means, section 191, which defines what “alcohol” means in this context, and section 192, which defines “sale by retail” (i.e. off-license).
The definition in section 191 actually makes a very specific exception for “alcohol which is of a strength not exceeding 0.5% at the time of the sale or supply in question,” which is, of course, the limit at which an otherwise alcoholic beverage can be called “alcohol-free”, and is conveniently the limit of the guarantee put on the product by many manufacturers, including Beck’s Blue.
I’m no lawyer, but it would appear that the popular interpretation that MitH puts forward has no grounding in actual law. And without the protection of the law, a retailer whose premises were accessible to children anyway (e.g. a supermarket) could theoretically be commiting an act of illicit age discrimination if they routinely refused to sell non-alcoholic drinks to minors… although we in the UK don’t have any specific legislation about age discrimination in this way (only gender and race, in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976, respectively), it’s still covered under European legislation, I’d bet. Fascinating.
Fascinating, but pointless. Why do I make myself suffer this way?