Vault City Alcohol-Free Beers

Vault City is an independent sour beer brewery that started in Edinburgh in 2018 and calls itself Scotland’s largest sour beer producer. Its one alcohol-free beer on sale now is Stoopid AF, a 0.5% tropical smoothie sour.

Who are Vault City?

Vault City Brewing Ltd was incorporated in January 2018. Companies House lists one person with significant control, its director Steven Smith-Hay, with 75% or more of the shares and votes; The Scotsman and DRAM Scotland both name him as a co-founder. A second early director and shareholder, Jonathan Horn, stepped down in 2020, Companies House shows; no source we found calls him a co-founder.

Vault City calls itself “an independent craft brewery and Scotland’s largest sour beer producer”, and elsewhere the UK’s largest dedicated one; those are its own claims, which we haven’t checked. When it bought its new site in 2024, crowdfunding helped it avoid outside investment, DRAM Scotland reported, quoting Smith-Hay that the purchase let it “retain” its independence. We found no drinks group involved, so we list it as independent.

From a 50-litre kit to its own brewery

Vault City’s July 2026 blog tells the story year by year. Brewing began at The Hanging Bat, an Edinburgh brewpub, on a 50-litre kit, and by July 2018 the business was official, with its cellar in the basement of a founder’s flat. An earlier blog, in 2024, recalled “brewing 400 litre batches of heavily fruited modern sour beer from a kitchen and basement in Edinburgh”.

In 2019 it hired its first employee and began brewing in Dundee, scaling from 400-litre to 4,000-litre batches, and its festivals that year included Dark & Wild, Beavertown Extravaganza and Indy Man Beer Con. In 2020 the team was “2 full-timers and one part timer”; that December it returned to Edinburgh and moved into its first dedicated brewery. In 2021 brewing moved to its Portobello site, it opened The Wee Vault, its taproom and bottle shop, and it moved to a four-day week, the blog says. Its first cans came in 2022, which opened up exports, and in 2023 it bought “The Vault Wagon”, a 1960s Bedford ice-cream van it takes to festivals.

In May 2024 DRAM Scotland reported that Vault City had bought a site at the BioCampus in the Midlothian Science Zone for £330,000: 34,000 sq ft, seven times the size of its Portobello brewery, paid for by a crowdfunder and its own sales. The brewer’s blog that July still described brewing at Portobello. Its 2026 blog says a second crowdfunding phase paid for the brewery build, and that brewing and packaging began at the new site in November 2025; it calls the build “a work in progress”. That blog doesn’t name the site; Companies House now gives the company’s registered office as the Biocampus, Penicuik.

What Vault City brews

Vault City says it brews its sours with a house culture and a mixed-fermentation base with “real fruit ingredients”. It gets through more than 200,000kg of fruit a year and releases at least three new beers every two weeks, it says. By its count it has made more than 500 beers since 2018; Untappd lists 534. Its Stoopid series, which began in 2024, is heavily fruited smoothie-style sours with coconut cream, and the same year it started printing a sour scale on its cans. In 2025 it marked five years of its Iron Brew sours and brewed its first GLOOP cream stout, a small batch, it says.

In 2022 Triple Fruited Mango and Blueberry Maple were the first and third best-selling lines in Tesco’s 440ml craft beer category, Beer Today reported. We found no awards for its alcohol-free beers, and no Vault City entries in SIBA’s 2025 or 2026 results.

How big is Vault City?

“More than 1.5 million litres brewed every year at our independent Edinburgh brewery”, the brewer said in July 2026: about 15,000 hectolitres (our sum). It began with two people and had 34 by July 2024, it said then. In an article we couldn’t date, The Scotsman reported turnover “heading towards £5m”, almost 30 staff and exports to more than 20 countries, and Smith-Hay claimed four in every five sour beers sold in the UK were Vault City’s; that’s his figure, not one we could check. In 2024 DRAM Scotland reported that its annual output “will” rise to more than 10 million litres a year, a plan rather than a result, and quoted Smith-Hay: “Our ambition is to be the biggest dedicated sour beer producer in the world.”

Vault City’s alcohol-free beers

Stoopid AF is the only one on sale now. Vault City calls it “a bold, tropical smoothie sour with stoopid levels of fruit intensity”, “jam packed with unfermented fruit”: peach, vanilla, banana, mango and coconut cream. It’s 0.5%, rated 1 on the brewer’s sour scale, in 440ml cans, and brewed with oats and malted barley, so it isn’t gluten-free. Vault City tags it vegan, as do The Alcohol Free Co and Beergonzo. Its shop has listed it since 30 June 2026; we found no launch announcement. Vault City doesn’t say how it keeps the alcohol down, or where it brews this beer, and nobody publishes its calories, sugar or full ingredients that we could find.

Earlier alcohol-free beers are still on its shop: AF Peach Cobbler, a 0.5% “peach pie pastry sour”, sold out; and two collaborations with Mash Gang. The first, The Schoff, came with the line “Your favourite modern sour beer is finally available at <0.5%” and has sold out; the second, Only in Dreams, a Strawberry & Jalapeno Margarita Pickleback, shows no price. The pages aren’t dated, so we can’t say when they were sold. Beer Today reported a third Mash Gang collaboration in 2022, Tahiti Treat, at 2.5%, so not alcohol-free.

How Stoopid AF compares

Alcohol-free sours in our directory. Calories as published; checked 31 October 2026. Scores are Unhopped ratings out of 10.

The Vault City beer in our directory

Checked October 2026. Scores are Unhopped ratings out of 10.

Where to buy Stoopid AF

On 29 October 2026 The Alcohol Free Co had single cans at £5.12 (an affiliate link). Vault City’s own shop was cheaper, at £3.75. Dry Drinker had sold out.

Facts checked against Vault City’s own website and blog, Companies House, DRAM Scotland, The Scotsman, Beer Today, Untappd, SIBA, The Alcohol Free Co, Dry Drinker and Beergonzo, 31 October 2026.