Bavaria

Bavaria is a Dutch beer. That sentence has irritated German brewers for generations — the name has even been contested in court — but the lager itself comes from Lieshout, a village in the southern Netherlands where the Swinkels family has been brewing since 1680.

The family still owns the company, now called Royal Swinkels Family Brewers, and still runs it from Lieshout. Its most famous moment came at the 2010 World Cup, when a group of women in orange minidresses — Bavaria's colors — appeared in the stands at a Netherlands match in South Africa. Officials ejected them for ambush marketing, and the eviction put a village brewery on front pages worldwide, which was of course the whole idea.

The other thing Bavaria did early was take alcohol-free beer seriously: Bavaria 0.0 sits beside the Premium lager as a genuine co-flagship rather than an afterthought. With 7.2 million hectoliters brewed in 2025, the family's beer now travels from the Netherlands across Europe and into the Middle East — a region where that 0.0 turns out to be a very useful thing to be good at.

Bavaria Premium pours clear light gold with a modest head and keeps things gentle: soft grainy malt, a hint of sweetness, low bitterness, brisk bubbles. The 0.0 is unusually convincing — wort-sweet and full for an alcohol-free lager. Both are made for easy drinking rather than contemplation, and honest about it.