“The product was never the problem”: UNLTD.’s Johnny Johnson on building a beer brand from scratch

Founder Interviews · August 2026 · interview by Rich

UNLTD. is one of the UK’s standout alcohol-free beer brands — a B Corp that brews the alcohol out from the start rather than stripping it from a finished beer, and whose pint cans are quietly reshaping how alcohol-free gets ordered in pubs. We sat down with co-founder Johnny Johnson to talk curiosity, character-building launch timing, and why the little bottle was always a social problem in disguise.

Take me back to the start — what made you build UNLTD., and was there a particular moment that tipped you into actually doing it?

Summer 2019, after a fairly raucous wedding, I decided to knock the booze on the head for three months. Not a grand plan — more curiosity than anything.

Three months in I was sleeping better, happier, and somehow had hours back in the week I didn’t know I’d been losing.

The one thing I properly missed was a cold beer at the end of a long day. So I went looking. I worked my way through pretty much everything on the shelf and there wasn’t a single one I’d have chosen over a beer — I was drinking them because they were alcohol-free, not because they were good.

That was the moment. Not a lightning bolt, just the realisation that if I felt like that, plenty of other people did too, and nobody was fixing it properly. I registered The Alcohol Free Brewing Company in September 2019 and UNLTD. launched in June 2020. Which, as launch windows go, was character-building.

“UNLTD.” and a .beer domain — what’s the thinking behind the brand?

UNLTD. is short for unlimited, and the whole point is what you get back rather than what you’re giving up. The category spent years talking to people about what they were missing. We wanted to talk about what they were unlocking. Hence “Unlock Your UNLTD.”

The full stop is deliberate. It’s a statement, not an abbreviation.

The .beer domain does a job in one word. We’re a beer company. We’re not a wellness brand, we’re not a soft drink, and we never wanted to end up shelved in the healthy alternatives aisle next to the kombucha. If you love beer and you want a beer, that’s who we’re for.

You brew the alcohol out rather than stripping it from a full-strength beer. Why take the harder road, and what does it mean for what ends up in the glass?

There are broadly two routes. You can brew a full-strength beer and then take the alcohol out of it, or you can brew it so the alcohol was never there in the first place. We do the second.

It’s harder. There’s far less margin for error and you can’t rescue a batch at the end — if the brew isn’t right, it isn’t right.

But when you strip alcohol out of a finished beer you take a lot of the aroma and body with it, and then you’re in the business of adding things back to cover the gap. What goes in our can is what came out of the brew.

That’s also where the calories come from, or rather don’t. UNLTD. IPA is 13 calories per 330ml can and the Lager is 23, both at 0.5% ABV. That’s the recipe doing the work, not dilution.

[Editor’s note, Sept 2026: UNLTD’s current cans list 23 kcal for the IPA and 40 kcal for the Lager, both 568ml pint cans — recipes and pack sizes evolve over time. Our UNLTD Lager review has the latest figures.]

You built B Corp in from the start rather than bolting it on later — why did that matter to you?

Because the version where you get big first and worry about it later never actually arrives. There’s always a reason to defer it.

Certification is also genuinely inconvenient, which is rather the point — it drags you through how you pay people, who you buy from, what you put in the ground. It’s a lot easier to build that in while you’re small than to unpick it when you’re not.

And honestly, in this category it matters. A lot of brands talk about doing things properly. B Corp is one of the few things that makes you show your working.

What’s been the hardest moment — the point where you weren’t sure it was going to work?

Launching a beer brand in June 2020, when every pub and bar in the country was shut, was not the plan.

But the harder lesson came later, and it’s less dramatic: getting a listing and actually selling through are two completely different jobs. Everybody celebrates the listing. The work is what happens in the eleven months afterwards — the staff training, the fridge placement, the reorder that either comes or doesn’t.

There were stretches where the numbers were genuinely uncomfortable. What kept us going was that every single time we got the beer into someone’s hand, they came back. The product was never the problem. Getting it in front of enough hands was.

The pint cans are apparently flying in the on-trade. What’s changing about where and how people drink alcohol-free?

The pint can was the single best decision we’ve made.

Here’s the thing nobody in the category wants to admit: most people who order an alcohol-free beer in a pub aren’t worried about the beer. They’re worried about being the person holding the little bottle while everyone else has a pint. It’s a social problem dressed up as a product problem.

A 568ml can lands on the bar and looks like everyone else’s drink. That’s it. That’s the whole insight.

The numbers backed it up faster than we expected — McMullens put it into their estate and shifted over 9,000 extra beers in five weeks.

What’s changing more broadly is that alcohol-free has stopped being the thing you order when you’re driving. It’s an option people actively choose, on the same night out, sometimes in the same round. That’s a completely different commercial proposition, and most venues haven’t caught up with it yet.

Where’s the whole category heading over the next few years, and where does UNLTD. sit in that?

The availability battle is basically over — you can find something alcohol-free almost anywhere now. The next fight is quality and occasion.

I think you’ll see the middle of the market get squeezed hard. Big brewers will own the mainstream shelf with 0.0 versions of what they already sell. What’s left is the premium end, where people are choosing a specific beer rather than accepting the alcohol-free one.

That’s where we sit, and it’s why we’ve gone hard at on-trade and hospitality rather than chasing volume in the multiples first. If we’re in Gaucho and the Eurostar lounges, we’ve earned the right to be on shelf. It doesn’t work as well the other way round.

And the easy one to finish: when and where do you crack open an alcohol-free beer yourself?

Most weekday evenings. With two young kids and a business to run, the working week and school runs are non-negotiable, so I always want to wake up fresh and ready to go.

The other one is in a customer’s bar, having just watched someone order our beer without knowing who I am. That never gets old.

Try UNLTD. for yourself

You can read our take on the brewery over on the UNLTD. brewery page, or go straight to our review of the UNLTD. Lager. If it’s the hop-forward end you’re after, the 13-calorie IPA Johnny mentions is the one to seek out.

New to alcohol-free beer and not sure where to start? Find the AF version of your usual pint with our Swap Finder, or browse every beer we’ve reviewed. And if you’re a founder in the alcohol-free space who’d like to be part of this series, get in touch.