Ambar Alcohol-Free Beers

Ambar: the brewery that invented Spanish alcohol-free beer

Cervezas Ambar — formally La Zaragozana — was founded in Zaragoza in 1900 as the ‘Fábrica de Cerveza, Malta y Hielo’, and it remains independent and family-owned more than 125 years on. The brewery still operates from its historic San José site, where it maintains its own maltings and the only open-vat fermentation room still working in Spain. But Ambar’s claim on this site is more specific: it launched Spain’s first alcohol-free beer, Ambar Sin, on 30 May 1976 — decades before ‘0.0’ became a category.

That pioneering streak never stopped. In 2011 Ambar brewed what it describes as the world’s first beer that was both gluten-free and alcohol-free, and in 2022 its flagship AF beer became Triple Zero: zero alcohol, zero sugar, with a gluten-free version alongside. For a mainstream regional brewery, that’s an unusually deep commitment to inclusive brewing — and it shows in how seriously the AF beers are made.

The San José brewery is a working museum of Spanish brewing — visitors can tour the original 1900 factory — and the beers keep collecting international medals, with Ambar Especial named among the world’s best at the World Beer Challenge. That combination of heritage and restlessness is exactly why its alcohol-free beers taste like proper beer first and a category exercise second.

Ambar’s alcohol-free range on Unhopped

We list three: Ambar Triple Zero Lager, the crisp zero-sugar flagship; Ambar 0.0 Tostada, a toasted amber take that’s rare in the AF world and shows off the brewery’s malt-forward house style; and Ambar 0 Radler for the citrus-shandy crowd. For the wider Spanish scene they sit in, see our guide to Spanish alcohol-free beer.