near beer

1. 1.

   drink that resembles beer but with less than 1/2 percent alcohol

   Broaderbeverage

Questions about near beer

What does near beer mean?

near beer means "drink that resembles beer but with less than 1/2 percent alcohol".

Is near beer a common word?

near beer is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.