Brazilian law calls a drink non-alcoholic below 0.5% alcohol; 0.0 versions follow an even lower ceiling
Anyone who buys non-alcoholic beer in Brazil does not always take home a drink with zero alcohol. Under federal rules, what makes a drink non-alcoholic is staying below 0.5% alcohol by volume. The topic returned to store shelves this week with the debut of Amstel 0.0, from Heineken Group, in the Brazilian market.
The general rule is in Decree No. 12,709 of October 31, 2025, which replaced the old Decree No. 6,871 of 2009 as the regulation of Law No. 8,918 of 1994, the beverage law. Article 11 splits drinks into two groups: non-alcoholic is anything with less than 0.5% alcohol by volume, measured at 20 °C; alcoholic runs from 0.5% to 54%. There is one exception: grape must may contain up to 1% and remain non-alcoholic.
The same article allows any alcoholic drink except spirits to be dealcoholized, as long as it follows the process the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock sets out in a supplementary rule. The decree defines beer by how it is made (fermentation of a boiled malted-barley wort with hops), and the details of each type are left to the ministry's rules.
The beer-specific rule is the ministry's Normative Instruction No. 65 of 2019. According to a report by Correio published in June, it sets three bands: zero-alcohol beer, or 0.0%, may contain at most 0.05% alcohol; non-alcoholic beer, up to 0.5%; and low-alcohol beer, up to 2.5%. In practice, anyone who wants to avoid any trace of alcohol should look for the 0.0 label.
The newspaper describes three ways to make the drink: stopping fermentation, removing the alcohol from finished beer (by vacuum distillation or reverse osmosis) or using yeasts that produce almost no ethanol. According to the same report, Brazil was the world's second-largest consumer of non-alcoholic beer in 2024, behind Germany, in World Brewing Alliance data, and Euromonitor projects 885 million liters consumed in the country in 2026.
Amstel 0.0 arrives in a 350 ml can with 59.5 kcal per unit, according to Guia da Cerveja. The publication cites NielsenIQ data: the non-alcoholic segment grew 17.9% in volume in 2026 over 2025 and is already in 14.4% of Brazilian households. The Bebidário catalog includes other beers in the category, such as Heineken 0.0, Budweiser Zero and Corona Cero Sunbrew.
Sources: Decree No. 12,709/2025 (Planalto, October 31, 2025), Correio (June 26, 2026), Guia da Cerveja (October 1, 2026).
