near beer
1
5.1
- noun
- /nɪr bɪr/
- Archaic
:
cerveza sin alcohol
- At the barbecue, everyone enjoyed their burgers with a near beer instead of traditional beer.
Examples
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It's near beer, but it ain't bad.
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Whippy Bird and I tried it once, and it tasted like hell, worse than near beer.
Fiction book (1990) -
So, you drink near beer and what else?
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- You expect to manufacture near beer?
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You would after the audience slept, self-conscious after the audience slept, you went from that horrible near beer or whatever it was you had to drink.
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And one of the awful things about it is that they at the end, they drink near beer instead of actual beer when they're on their victorious defeat.
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I ordered a cold near beer to enjoy while watching the game.
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After my workout, I treated myself to a refreshing near beer with friends.
Synonyms
9
2.6
A kind of beer with less alcohol and fewer calories than regular beer
How Alcoholic
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a beverage that tastes like beer but contains very little alcohol' is directly derivable from combining 'near' (almost/similar to) with 'beer' (the beverage). The compositional pattern 'near + noun' signals something resembling but not fully identical to the referent, a cross-linguistically common logic that a B1 learner who knows both words can readily infer.
Etymology
Near beer may come from the time when strong alcohol was banned, when beer makers made a drink near beer, with the same taste but 'very little alcohol'. Because the drink was 'near' real beer, near beer today means a drink that 'tastes like beer' but has 'very little alcohol'.