The newest trend in athletic recovery? Drinking beer – San Francisco Chronicle

What if there were a beverage you could drink after a major workout — like a marathon or a mountain biking expedition — that could replenish electrolytes, reduce inflammation and leave you less likely to get sick? What if that product had fewer than 100 calories per serving and, unlike Gatorade, no sugar?

What if that beverage were called … beer?

Welcome to the age of wellness beer, in which craft brews can be tools for athletic recovery, self-care and all-around physical optimization. In the Bay Area and beyond, we’re witnessing a proliferation of beers geared toward a healthier lifestyle, with options that are friendly to the gluten-averse. The wellness beers advertise additions of electrolytes, chia seeds, potassium, even bee pollen. With little or no alcohol, many promise the hangover-free aftermath of an O’Doul’s and the low calorie count of a Michelob Ultra — but with the complexity of flavor you’ve come to expect from top-quality craft.

Big Beer has taken notice of the success of homespun wellness beer brands including Surreal Brewing in Campbell, Zelus Beer in Massachusetts, Wellbeing Brewing in Missouri and Athletic Brewing in Connecticut. Now, Boston’s Harpoon has launched Rec League, a hazy pale ale with “a healthy dose of hops, sea salt, buckwheat and chia,” according to its website, while Colorado’s Avery Brewing has Go Play, an “activated IPA” with added sodium and potassium. Heineken, PBR and Brooklyn Brewery all have new nonalcoholic products. Even ABInBev, which makes O’Doul’s, has come out with a new booze-free prototype: Budweiser Prohibition.

“This idea of functional beer, better-for-you beer — there’s been a lot of chat in the beer industry over the last six to 12 months,” says Jeff White, president and CEO of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. That chatter recently led Sierra Nevada to purchase Sufferfest, a 3-year-old San Francisco company that produces gluten-removed beers (and, in the case of its Kolsch, beer with bee pollen added).

Sufferfest, whose headquarters is in the Marina, markets itself to athletes — especially to that quintessentially San Francisco athlete who bikes on Mount Tam, jogs up Twin Peaks, belongs to a bouldering gym and is working to perfect his or her sirsasana pose. The brewery was born out of founder Caitlin Landesberg’s desire to find a beer “that agreed with my digestion,” she says, after long trail runs.

Her early experiments brewing with sorghum, a gluten-free grain, were disappointing. But while attending brewing courses at UC Davis Extension, Landesberg discovered that she could add an enzyme to a beer to remove gluten proteins — and the Sufferfest recipe was born. (Because the beers may still contain trace amounts of gluten, the labels are legally required to say “gluten-removed” instead of “gluten-free.” Sufferfest says its beers contain fewer than 10 parts per million gluten.)

The company’s branding feels less like a typical craft brewery and more like a typical San Francisco wellness startup. The target demographic wears compression shorts, not flannel — and definitely not a gluten-loaded pretzel necklace. A new deal with Equinox will place Sufferfest cans at the elite fitness chain. The company’s mottos are #willsweatforbeer and #earnedit.

“If I had the choice between pouring at a beer festival or at the finish line of Double Dipsea, it’s Double Dipsea,” Landesberg says, referring to the extreme running challenge in Marin. “It’s the sense of — we’re out here earning our beer, we’re out here working for something bigger.”

As of this month, Sufferfest has some local competition in the gluten-removed beer space. Surreal Brewing, a small family operation in Campbell, just got label approval for its gluten-removed Red IPA — which also happens to be, like all of Surreal’s beers, nonalcoholic. (Landesberg hinted that a nonalcoholic beer is in the works at Sufferfest, too.)

Like Landesberg, husband and wife Donna Hockey and Tammer Zein-El-Abedein started Surreal because there wasn’t a beer on the market that fit with their lifestyle. The couple had cut alcohol out of their diets after Hockey was diagnosed with breast cancer. “We stopped drinking at the worst time ever, right as craft beer came onto the scene,” jokes Zein-El-Abedein, who worked in autonomous driving technology before the couple launched the brewery.

Tired of being stuck with O’Doul’s and sugary lemonade at parties, they decided to try to make booze-free beer that actually tasted good, working with styles like IPA and porter rather than the standard light lager. (Hockey and Zein-El-Abedein won’t share their recipe, but they will say that, unlike some industrially made nonalcoholic beers, they do not arrest fermentation or pasteurize.) Their beers have between 33 and 50 calories per can and are distributed in Total Wine stores nationwide.

“If you really like beer, now you can have it anytime, multiple times a day, even at work,” says Hockey by phone one morning. “I’m enjoying a craft beer right now, talking to you.”

All of this alcohol removal, gluten reduction and electrolyte enhancement can start to sound like lipstick on a pig. After all, alcohol notwithstanding, isn’t beer just a bunch of simple carbs and empty calories? Sure, you can make beer less bad for you — but can beer ever really be good for you?

Actually, maybe. There’s some scientific evidence to suggest that beer — as in, just regular beer, not any of these newfangled wellness creations — has health benefits, especially for athletes. “Long story short, beer, which is now being touted as a sports beverage, has a modest amount of polyphenols,” says David Nieman, professor of health and exercise science at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Polyphenols are compounds that occur naturally in plants and contain antioxidant properties; beer naturally contains many polyphenols including ferulic acid, quercetin and tyrosol.

Nieman does not recommend consuming alcohol during a workout. “I just think mentally you want to be all there” — which, duh — but “during recovery I see nothing wrong with it,” he says. “The alcohol isn’t going to do anything for athletic recovery. You’re still getting the polyphenols.”

For a 2012 study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Nieman observed the effects of nonalcoholic beer on runners training for the Munich Marathon. The study found that the athletes who had drunk nonalcoholic beer showed lower levels of inflammation and lower incidence of upper respiratory tract illness than a placebo group.

In other words, training with beer is “kind of like taking a mild ibuprofen,” Nieman says. (He believes it’s in fact better than taking an ibuprofen, since the so-called Vitamin I can cause damage to the lining of intestine cells.) The German Olympic ski team — whose doctor, Johannes Scherr, was Nieman’s co-author on the marathon paper — famously consumed nonalcoholic beer by the liter while training for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang,South Korea.

“We’re never going to, say, replace water with beer,” Sufferfest’s Landesberg says of athletic recovery. But she points out that many of the typical offerings at the end of an organized race have their own dietary limitations. If it’s a choice between beer or gummy bears and Gatorade, could beer be the healthier choice after all?

A beer is a fine choice for polyphenol seekers, Nieman says. But he cautions that it is not the only vehicle for polyphenol replenishment. In fact, his research has discovered one comestible that appears to be the optimal source of sugar, potassium, fiber, vitamins and polyphenols. It’s low in calories, free of gluten and alcohol-free. It’s a banana.