Tomas Peterka launches Czechia's first alcohol-free brewery

While classic Czech beer is gradually losing ground, non-alcoholic versions are experiencing a real boom — and it's on this wave that Tomáš Peterka, co-owner of the marketing agency Konektime, decided to launch a fundamentally new project: the Feels Good brewery, which from the very start bets exclusively on non-alcoholic beer.

The idea wasn't born in the brewing world, but from Peterka's personal experience while traveling around Scandinavia, Poland and Lithuania. “I saw shelves packed with beautiful cans of non-alcoholic beer, and next to them a separate section for Czech beer, labeled in what looked almost like gothic script, as if from the century before. It annoyed me, and I thought something could be done about it,” the entrepreneur recalls.

According to him, entering the classic alcoholic beer market made no sense — competition there is too fierce, and besides, he himself drinks less as he gets older. Realizing that breweries working exclusively with the non-alcoholic segment already existed abroad, he understood he'd found his direction.

That's how the idea for a brand built entirely around zero alcohol was born, aimed at the generation of thirty- and forty-somethings who have already “had their fill of partying” and now choose beer primarily for its taste, not its alcohol content.

To bring the project to life, Peterka teamed up with his former Vodafone colleague Michal Šindler and illustrator Jiří Jaroš. In early July the team launched the new Feels Good brand onto the market — doing so against the backdrop of the whole segment's rapid growth: last year alone, Czech breweries produced 1.7 million hectoliters of non-alcoholic beer and beer mixes, twice as much as ten years ago.

Major market players, including Plzeňský Prazdroj and Heineken, are also seeing steady growth in interest in alcohol-free varieties, but Feels Good is the first project in the country to bet exclusively on this segment, with no regard for traditional alcoholic beer.