In paid partnership with Tracksuit. Data provided by Tracksuit; editorial control by THE GOODS.
LONDON—Most of us settle for the security of a regular salary. We have credible ideas, realistic ideas that make business sense but the risk of leaving our well-paid reliable job is too great. Mortgages, families to feed. So we rent our ambition to someone else’s strategy, mute the irritation and carry on. Some are fine with that. Others aren’t. We talk about the “frustrated creative,” how about the frustrated entrepreneur?
Living outside the UK for most of the year, LinkedIn is where I see most new UK products first. Lucky Saint kept showing up; founder-led posts, the Marylebone pub with HQ upstairs, run clubs, the distinctive blue. See something enough times, intrigue sets in and it becomes the first thing, along with a good meal at the Fishpool, you want when you land.
Luke Boase did not set out to be a founder. He says reflectively, “My dad had his own business and built a career out of that. It never crossed my mind to start a business until I was about ten years into my career. I was fed up with not being in control of my own destiny, other people’s decisions steering everything. Then I met two tech founders, caught their enthusiasm and ambition, and it opened my eyes to a whole other way of working. I’d had this stereotype that FMCG brands start at farmers’ markets, or tech companies start in a garage. Meeting them showed me there isn’t just one origin story.”
He adds. “Our category is about wide distribution and consistent execution. You don’t sell huge quantities in one place; you sell smaller quantities everywhere.”
Boase continued in employment whilst running with the idea to ‘take the most maligned corner of beer, alcohol-free’, and make something people would ask for with a straight face; remember, this was 2017. “There’s such a good proposition, giving someone the full beer experience without the alcohol, for the moments you don’t want the after-effects,” Boase says.
He was never going to be a brewer. “You can learn a lot on Google,” he laughs. “I searched what the ingredients do, then how you brew alcohol-free beer.”
Then came two years of outreach and rejection. “I spent two years reaching out to breweries, five in total, trying to build relationships and convince them about the idea. Most were more interested in brewing an 8% double IPA than figuring out great beer at 0.5%,” he says. At home, Boase says, “My wife was very supportive. My friends were probably somewhat laughing behind my back. That was where the category was then; people didn’t really respect it and it wasn’t consumed in the way it is now.”
Eventually a German brewery leaned in. He hustled to secure the meeting, he says, breaking into a broad smile. “It was over email. I said I was in the area. You’re always just passing through, right? They agreed to go on the journey and we still brew with them today.” The recipe was done by late 2017. Brand work ran through 2018 and launched in October.
Luke was ready to hire his first salesperson. This is what I love about the Blueprints series—watching a founder’s eyes light up as they revisit the first break and go back to where it all began.
Sitting with a recruiter, Boase by chance named his dream client; it was a throwaway comment. “I was talking to a recruiter and happened to say one of my dream listings would be Honest Burgers because of what they stand for in terms of quality,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but Tom, one of the founders, was best man at my wedding. I’m having dinner with him tonight. Do you want an intro?’ I met Tom the following week. He doesn’t drink, loved the beer, didn’t have alcohol-free beer on his menu. This was in August, he said, ‘Great, our next menu change is the first of October.’ So we went in all of their restaurants.” So that was Lucky Saint’s first sale. “We’re still very proud to work with Honest today.”
Distribution then rippled outward. “We launched on the first of October with thirty-three venues,” he says. “In October we won eighty new listings, in November ninety, and in December one hundred.” A founder’s metronome clicked into place. He says, “I remember realising the more emails I sent today, the more responses I’d get tomorrow and the more listings the day after that. If I waited until tomorrow, then I’d have to wait until the day after for a response.” Boase shares, “The early stage of the business was highly rewarding. When you go from one listing to two, you’ve just doubled your business. When you go from 100 to 200, you’ve done a hundred per cent growth in a month. That’s fun.”
The first supermarket “yes” arrived just before Christmas 2018. Boase met the man who would later become Lucky Saint’s chairman. Over a short conversation, he offered the category insight that would shape the pitch: non-alcoholic habits form at home, which makes grocery a critical stage for alcohol-free in a way it is not for alcoholic beer. Then he said he would introduce Boase to Sainsbury’s Future Brands team.
Boase says, “It was a Thursday. The introduction landed on the Friday. I was in Holborn on the Monday morning. Future Brands ran the range review that afternoon and called on Tuesday. Roughly eighty stores took Lucky Saint as part of the programme. We became the highest cash rate of sale in the category, despite not running promotions.”
Conventional beer playbooks say you build in bars and then flow into retail. Alcohol-free flips that script. “People are much more comfortable and experimental at home. It’s easier to convince someone to try an alcohol-free beer at home on a Monday than in a bar on Friday,” Boase says. That inversion now anchors Lucky Saint’s strategy. “Every channel has a part to play,” Boase says. “Most people come across Lucky Saint in more than one place – whether that's in the supermarket aisle, or down the pub.”
Early on, Boase was on the sampling stations at Sainsbury’s and the responses were fascinating; consumer behaviour is fascinating. “You couldn’t just say, ‘Do you want to try an alcohol-free beer?’ People would say, ‘No, I don’t like it,’ or, ‘I’m driving.’ We changed the opening, offering something to eat, then, ‘This goes really well with alcohol-free beer.’”
Fast-forward to 2025 and the picture has shifted. Policy nudges matter at the margins, but product quality and cultural habits are doing most of the work. Non-alcoholic beer is moving from curiosity to default option in more occasions, particularly in the UK.
Tracksuit data indicates 49% of UK adults either buy or would consider alcohol-free beer. Nationally, Lucky Saint is still smaller than the category’s biggest players, yet it is one of the few showing a meaningful 12-month lift in usage.
London acts as the live lab: awareness 40%, consideration 28%, usage 23%, preference 7%.
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Lucky Saint launched with its unfiltered lager and kept the range to that single beer for five years, adding an exceptional Hazy IPA in 2023. Explaining why, Boase says: “Eighty per cent of the world’s beer consumption is lager. If alcohol-free is going to leave the novelty shelf, it’ll do it via a lager people re-order.”
Extra SKUs came only when pull and shelf logic aligned: the Hazy IPA to court flavour-forward drinkers, then Lemon Lager and Weissbier in 2025. “An additional product doubles your visibility on shelf,” he says. “It delivered incremental sales and helped lager grow rather than cannibalise it, because we suddenly had twice as much space [after launching the Hazy IPA].”
Anchored to Boase’s blueprint sits a non-negotiable. “Quality across the board,” he says. “Taste is the number one driver. Alcohol-free carried a reputation problem, so we had to prove it tastes fantastic, and be maniacal about consistency, from the brew to the fill. So the beer in the glass is the beer that left the line.”
“Looking back, we launched one SKU in the wrong format and the wrong channel. We’d always planned to move it into glass, but convinced ourselves cans would do for a start and it created more problems than it solved. The learning was simple: launch it right, not fast.”
Luke is pragmatic. “We do run promotions now. It’s an important way of acquiring new customers and competing in the category,” he says. “But we monitor very carefully what our volume on deal is, because we need to ensure we’re well below the category average.” He points to a line from Sam Adams founder Jim Koch: “There are only two levers. There’s price and there’s quality.”
The lesson, as Luke frames it: small brands shouldn’t try to win on price; compete on quality, and treat promotions as a way to recruit, not a crutch for volume.
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Without a brewery tour to point to, the team built a better home for the story - The Lucky Saint Pub, with the HQ upstairs. We used Lucky Saint as a case study for an open HQs piece last year and why more brands should do likewise.
It’s not just a billboard, it’s a busy Marylebone pub that hosts run clubs, and happens to over-trade in alcohol-free; it’s the first pub to be run by an alcohol-free brand. “There is no better reflection on Lucky Saint than a really busy Lucky Saint pub,” Boase says. “It has to be a great pub first; hospitality, atmosphere, a tight curated range. Fewer beers, done properly. We equalise alcoholic and non-alcoholic options and massively over-trade in non-alc.”
As The Economist reported in October: ‘Though booze is on offer, about 15% of sales are of Lucky Saint… Other patrons merrily sip alcohol-free cocktails and sparkling wine. “Go back a couple of years and people used to cleanse in January,” says Nate Roberts, one of the managers, “but now we see this 365 days per year.”’
Ask Luke who the two hires were that changed the course of the business and he’d say, “We hired a managing director. Emma joined in February 2020, just before lockdown. For a business our size, and where we were on the journey, bringing in someone that senior felt audacious. But we had enough proof points to say, ‘Let’s build the foundations to scale,’ so we invested ahead of the curve.”
“And, honestly, one of the biggest game-changers has been bringing PR in-house,” he adds. “It's transformed the relationships we’ve built. Getting Kevin in to lead it made all the difference.”
Two years of searching for the right brewery, a secure employed job, and friends who weren’t entirely onboard. Was there a point Boase felt like walking away? He says, “I don’t remember feeling that. There wasn’t a need to give up. It all felt like an opportunity. If a much better idea had come along, maybe I’d have switched, but in the absence of that I was enjoying the chase. As long as we were making progress, I felt we’d get there. I’d tried the UK, then Belgium and then to Germany,” he pauses. “But I don’t know where I would have gone after that.”
What endures about Luke is not the category he helped legitimise but the calm conviction behind it. Consistent. Quietly exacting. People will call parts of it luck. For me, it looks more like hard work meeting its moment, and the persistence to ask for the right meetings in the right rooms.
Lucky Saint now feels almost monkish in its discipline. It remains a founder-led brand. A small senior team keeps the rhythm: Emma setting structure, newly promoted CMO, Kerttu, shaping taste into desire, Kevin giving it a voice.
And on the monkish note, will we one day see a Lucky Saint stout—Lucky Saint’s Monk? I would welcome another alcohol-free stout option with depth. Luke says there are no plans. Watch this space.
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Lucky Saint today pours in more than 10,000 pubs, bars and restaurants, sits in major supermarkets across the UK, is listed in over 80 Michelin-star restaurants and runs a growing direct-to-consumer business. It is now the UK’s leading dedicated alcohol-free beer brand — and one of the fastest-growing names in the category.
