Our Story

by Ronan McGovern

The pilsner style of beer has always been my favourite. It's crisp, it's refreshing and it's delicate - making it a tricky beer to brew. If ever I were to make a non-alcoholic beer, I knew it would be a pilsner. Maintaining the clean and subtle taste of a pilsner, while removing alcohol, would be the ultimate test.

I didn't start off trying to make a non-alcoholic beer. It's something I discovered along the way while building a process engineering company called Sandymount Technologies - a spin-out I started right after my PhD at MIT. One day, while running tests on a membrane filtration system, we found that - with some engineering changes - it was possible to very precisely remove both alcohol and water from beer, without significantly impacting the beer's original flavour. As the approach began to show promise, we decided to test it out on the most difficult of beers - a pilsner lager. The result was Point 5.

Brewed as a pilsner, with alcohol precisely removed using Sandymount's Revos technology, Point 5 is a refreshing beverage I now drink while working, when outdoors, or when I want to take it easy socialising with friends. Right now you can order it online in 39 states in the US, and I hope that we can expand that further soon - maybe some day we'll even have it in Ireland, which is where I grew up. I hope you get to try some - whether at work, outdoors or with friends.

Thanks for reading, cheers, Ronan