There’s another local brewery joining the growing nonalcoholic beer market, but Eagle Park is doing it differently than most.
The Muskego-based brewery’s new Solid State line of beers – which should begin arriving in stores in the next week – is made in-house, without the use of dealcoholizing technology.
Solid State is launching with four styles developed over a year of tinkering with recipes: a Mexican lager with lime, a pale ale brewed with Citra and Simcoe hops, a hazy IPA with Citra and Mosaic hops, and a sour ale with cranberry and orange.
Driven by younger drinkers who are increasingly passing on alcohol, N/A beer sales nationwide were up another 22% at mid-2025 after several straight years of major gains. N/A has more than doubled its share of the beer market since 2022, though it remains small at 1.4%. A handful of Wisconsin breweries have released nonalcoholic beers, including Lakefront Brewery, which produces N/A versions of two of its longest-running beers, Riverwest Stein and Eastside Dark.
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Modern N/A beers are a far cry from the widely maligned, watered-down N/A beers of old like O’Doul’s or Sharp’s. They come in craft beer clothing – IPAs, ambers, wheat beers, even the oxymoronic N/A stout. Many of these modern beers are made by fully brewing beer and then removing the alcohol.
There are a few, very complicated ways to dealcoholize beer – think vacuums plus heat, or reconstituting beer after intense filtration. These methods require elaborate equipment that is often cost-prohibitive for most craft brewers. Most of the smaller breweries offering N/A beers have them made at larger breweries that invested in such technology – around here, notably Pilot Project Brewing in Milwaukee and Octopi Brewing in Waunakee.
But Eagle Park co-owner Jake Schinker didn’t want to go that route with Solid State, both to keep the beer made under his team’s watch, and to avoid any damage to delicate beer. “In my personal drinking experience, having these products go through that process, there is a flavor change to it,” he says. “Either filtration or heating in some form, there is going to be change to a product.”
Instead, Eagle Park is using a specially engineered yeast that does ferment the beer – an important process so the near-beer feels like beer-beer in your mouth – but only produces a small amount of alcohol, keeping the ABV below the 0.5% threshold required to call a product nonalcoholic.
But that’s really the easy part. Harder is finding the perfect balance of hops (bringing bitterness and aromatics) and malt (the grain-derived sugars commonly referred to as the “backbone” of beer). Screw up that delicate balance and you end up with various stripes of hot mess: an overhopped flavor bomb or the syrupy, “green” underfermented profile that made N/A beers punch lines decades ago. Schinker believes that latter character taints many of the modern iterations of craft N/A beers that have proliferated in recent years.
“It’s a very specific taste that goes through a lot of the options on the market right now, and we have pretty much eliminated that entirely,” Schinker says. “That is the biggest thing we were trying to fight in our research process; it’s this very unique balancing act. We nerded out about every aspect of the drinking experience to try and make it as close to real beer as possible.”
Schinker says he and the Eagle Park management team knew they’d found the right recipes when they noticed staff taking the “Demo Track” beers that became Solid State for their “shifties” – free beers after work is finished. “We knew we were getting really close,” he says, “and it was soon after that that we decided to take the jump and split off this separate line.”
Schinker says the plan is to keep tinkering and develop new beers in the Solid State line, including new hop profiles in the hop-forward beers, different fruit blends in the sour and seasonal releases. “We’ll see where it takes us,” Schinker says.
The Taste Test
So, how’d they do? I tried a few sample cans provided by Eagle Park ahead of Solid State’s wide release and came away mostly impressed.
First things first: Alcohol imparts flavor and, most importantly, body to beer that I’ve never seen any N/A beer fully replace. That’s the case with Solid State, too. They simply drink differently than the full-octane styles they’re approximating.
But still, these are unquestionably Eagle Park beers. This brewery brings big flavors to its liquids, and these are no exception, even if the hops and fruits are carefully calibrated.
My tasting began with the pale ale (the beers’ names are simply their styles), and it turned out to be a good starting point: a lovely, nuanced aroma of floral and candied citrus. Knowing these are made differently from most N/A beers I’ve had, I wasn’t sure what to expect from my first sip and was pleasantly surprised. This beer is thin, yes, but it just drinks like an exceptionally light pale ale – one that, if it were, say, 4% ABV, people would call a crusher. Win.
The cran-orange sour was similar if inverted from the pale ale: more muted on the aroma but with a nice, full fruit flavor in pleasant harmony between tart and sweet. The sour has the fullest body of the four Solid State beers so far; I imagine the fruit purées contribute to that.
In my experience, hazy IPA is probably the hardest style to bring into the N/A world – though most breweries that make N/As do offer one, because it’s craft beer’s most popular style. Solid State’s hazy is relatively clear but drips with style’s signature tropical fruit and soft-citrus aromas. A sip delivers those hop flavors, but the body is uncharacteristically (for an alcohol-full hazy) thin, and there is a touch of that green character that the Eagle Park team was trying to avoid.
My favorite, just ahead of the pale ale, was the Mexican lager with lime. It’s very lime-forward, which is always a good way to go, but it also benefits from being attached to a style that works fine with a whisper-light body. There’s not a ton of beer flavor happening here, but it does blend well with the big punch of lime – perhaps it should be called lime with Mexican lager. Anyway, I could drink a lot of it very quickly.
Altogether, it’s a strong start for Solid State. They’re options that would find my fridge during Dry January, though I’m not doing that; or for sprinkling in during drinking sessions to keep my head, and I am doing that.
