A British brand whose beer is made in Germany.

Lucky Saint is an alcohol-free lager sold under its own name by Not Another Beer Co Ltd, a private limited company that the Companies House register shows was incorporated in the UK in August 2017 and is still active. English Wikipedia credits the beer to its founder, Luke Boase, and dates the launch in the United Kingdom to October 2018, citing a 2023 feature in the business magazine Raconteur. An investor announcement of January 2023 from the ProVen VCTs, the funds managed by the venture firm Beringea, also gives 2018 as the year Boase founded the company.

The brand is British, but the beer is not made in Britain. English Wikipedia says Boase developed it with an established brewery in the German state of Bavaria, after about two years of trials with several breweries across Europe, and that the result was left unfiltered. The company tells the story in similar terms: it says Boase met the owner of the brewery in Bavaria, and that the founding beer was a classic lager brewed for six weeks and left unfiltered. The company does not name the brewery on its story page.

The trade magazine Labels & Labeling reported in September 2023 that the lager is brewed and bottled in Germany. In the same feature, Lucky Saint’s head of creative, Megan Taylor, described the method: the beer is brewed in the same way as a full-strength Bavarian lager, she said, and the alcohol is then taken out at the end through vacuum distillation. The company says the draught version arrived in pubs in January 2020, a date English Wikipedia also records.

A ladybird, a sideways name and a deliberate blue.

The name is explained by the company in two halves. “Lucky,” it says, stands for the luck it takes to get a good idea off the ground, and “Saint” is a wry nod to the virtue of choosing to drink alcohol-free. The emblem follows from the first half. Every bottle, the company says, carries a golden ladybird, a traditional sign of good luck. Taylor told Labels & Labeling that a ladybird landed on a bottle while Boase was first working on the beer, and that he then learned the insect was a symbol of good fortune; the brand has used it in gold foil ever since, and a ladybird also sits on the bottle’s neck label.

The identity was built with the design agency Otherway, Labels & Labeling reported, with the goal of an iconic brand that would stand out among alcohol-free beers. The type foundry and design studio MuirMcNeil says Otherway’s identity for Lucky Saint centres on a custom typeface that MuirMcNeil designed. The agency looked to brands that do one thing very well, Taylor said, and named Guinness as an example.

Colour was chosen with the category in mind. Blue is common among alcohol-free beers, Taylor said, and the brand wanted to sit alongside its neighbours rather than break away, while keeping a modern look; the result is a strong contrast of blue and white. The most unusual move is the sideways logo. On bottles and cans the name runs vertically rather than across the label, and Taylor said that on product packaging it is always placed that way, as a statement of confidence. The magazine added that the bottle shape was chosen to stand apart from the standard 330ml bottle, that foiling was treated as non-negotiable, and that the back label carries a mission statement about moderation.

Cans brought their own problems. Taylor said the Lucky Saint blue was hard to reproduce on metal, where the silver shows through, and that very small type is harder to print on a can than on a paper label. She described the can as the on-the-go format and the bottle as the one for restaurants and the fridge at home.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are cider and alcohol-free drinks names: Old Mout, Dunkertons, Sheppy’s, Henney’s, Ceder’s, Big Drop and Lucky Saint. Four are ciders, and three were built around drinks without alcohol: an alcohol-free alternative to gin and two alcohol-free beers. Brands like these sit at many different points in the trade, from family cider makers that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and to young companies started to fill a gap on the shelf.

A cider or an alcohol-free drink is usually recognised less by what is in the glass than by a label, a name and the place or story it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or had its drinks made by someone else from the start. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its labels and cans have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From one lager to a pub of its own.

For five years the brand made a single beer. The Caterer reported in December 2023 that Lucky Saint had launched a Hazy IPA, its second beer and its first new product since the original lager of 2018; Boase said it had taken two years to develop. The company’s growth was funded partly by outside investors. The ProVen VCTs announced in January 2023 that they had led a Series A funding round together with JamJar Investments, the fund of the founders of innocent drinks, and said the money would help expand draught distribution and take the brand into Europe. In the same announcement Boase said the company’s own pub and headquarters would open in central London.

That pub opened in Marylebone in 2023, the company says, under the name The Lucky Saint; English Wikipedia notes that it serves beers with and without alcohol, including those of other brewers. English Wikipedia, citing B Lab’s directory, says the company is a certified B Corporation. In March 2025 the trade title Drinks Intelligence reported that Lucky Saint had joined the Portman Group, which it described as the UK’s alcohol labelling watchdog, as an associate member; the Portman Group described it as its first alcohol-alternative member. The company’s own website is luckysaint.co.

For a design guide, Lucky Saint shows how a young brand can claim a crowded shelf with a few firm decisions: a blue chosen to sit alongside the category, a name turned on its side, a custom typeface and a single gold-foiled ladybird that tells its founding story. Compare Clausthaler, the German alcohol-free beer from Frankfurt, and Athletic Brewing, the American non-alcoholic craft brewer. For this guide we use saint blue, ladybird gold and white with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lucky Saint’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.