Go Brewing: The 75-Day Pact That Built an NA Brewery

In the spring of 2020, Joe Chura and his wife Heather made a deal with each other. Seventy-five days, no alcohol.

He was in his forties. He had been drinking socially since he was a teenager, and by his own telling it was uneven. Some weeks one drink. Some nights six or seven. He never thought he had a problem, which is a sentence a lot of people have said. Then the pandemic arrived and the drinking and the food and the sleep all got worse together.

Seventy-five days turned into permanent. They started working out. They felt better.

Then they went back out into the world and discovered that the world had not changed. They still liked bars. They still liked breweries. There was still nothing to order.

That gap is the entire premise of Go Brewing, and in six years it has become one of the more consequential companies in American beer.

The founder had a head start

It is worth being direct about this, because most brand stories skip it.

Chura started on a Ford assembly line at twenty. He worked up through Ford's regional sales team and ran two dealerships. That led to two Naperville tech companies, Launch Digital Marketing and Dealer Inspire, both of which were acquired by Cars.com in 2018 in a deal worth $165 million.

So when he decided to build a non-alcoholic brewery, he did not have to raise money, take a co-packing deal, or compromise on a brewer. He put roughly $3 million of his own capital into a 3,000 square foot space in Naperville, hired a professional brewer from day one, and refused to contract-brew a single can.

This matters more than it sounds. Almost every non-alcoholic startup begins by renting somebody else's brewhouse, because non-alcoholic beer requires expensive equipment that alcoholic beer does not. You need a pasteurizer. You need a real microbiology lab. Beer with no alcohol in it has nothing defending it from contamination, and the pH has to be held down or the whole batch turns.

Go built all of that first, then made beer.

His co-founders are Heather Chura, head brewer James Bigler, who came from Alter Brewing in Downers Grove, and Bruce Etzcorn, who had run operations at Dealer Inspire. Naperville had to raise its cap on brewery liquor licenses from three to four to let them open on Quincy Avenue, in a 7,000 square foot building that had been a cidery. It became the first non-alcoholic and low-alcohol brewery in Illinois.

The number that started it

Chura did the research before he did anything else.

That is not a gap in taste. That is a gap in supply.

There was a second, quieter advantage he noticed. Beer under 0.5% alcohol by volume is legally non-alcoholic, which means it can be shipped directly to a residence in almost every state in the country. A conventional brewery cannot do that. Go could sell online from day one, and it did.

They brew it. They do not un-brew it.

There are four ways to make non-alcoholic beer, and they sort into two families.

Everything happens in the building: the malting, the brewing, the lab work, the canning, the labeling. Chura is candid about why it is hard. Alcohol carries sweetness and body, roughly seven calories per gram, and when you take it out of the equation you have to rebuild the mouthfeel of a beer out of grain and hops and process.

One honest note. The precise mechanics are proprietary and the company's public descriptions of them have varied across interviews and marketing copy over the years. What is consistent and verifiable is the category: Go makes fermented non-alcoholic beer in its own facility rather than removing alcohol from finished beer. That is the meaningful distinction, and it is the one you can taste.

Every Go beer finishes at or under 0.5% ABV. Most land between 65 and 89 calories.

Thirty-plus beers, and they are not timid

The early Best of Craft Beer Awards gold and silver arrived three months after launch, which is an absurd thing to accomplish in a category people had spent forty years ignoring. By January 2026 the company was announcing two World Beer Cup medals and Untappd's Lager of the Year. The lineup runs well past thirty:

The cans look like street art. There is no apology anywhere on them. That is deliberate: for four decades the shelf signal for non-alcoholic beer was a beige can that told you exactly what you were giving up. Eric Schmidt, who owns the Orange and Brew bottleshop in Downers Grove, put the old guard's problem plainly to Crain's, saying brands like O'Doul's and Sharp's had never really scratched the itch that people have for brew.

The finish line is the new bar

Here is the part that should interest anyone who sells beverages for a living. Go Brewing does not fight for tap handles. It goes where the customer already is, and that customer is at a race.

Since November 2025, Go has been the exclusive non-alcoholic beer sponsor of HYROX in the United States, extending a relationship that had already run three years. HYROX is a fitness racing format, eight one-kilometer runs alternating with eight workout stations, and it is exploding. The 2025 World Championships in Chicago drew more than ten thousand athletes and fans. Go builds a finish-line bar, hands out co-branded HYROX GO Water, and runs an activation called the Beer Mile'ish, where you chug a Go beer and run a tenth of a mile on a treadmill with your pace on a live leaderboard.

At a Chicago sprint triathlon, the Go activation included two ice baths.

Think about what that is. It is beer sampling to an audience that has self-selected for exactly the thing non-alcoholic beer sells: the desire to have the drink and keep the morning. Chura said he did his first HYROX in 2023 and knew immediately that these were his people.

Then, in January 2026, the money arrived and confirmed the thesis. Rich Roll, the ultra-endurance athlete and podcaster, invested through Rich Roll Enterprises, with a follow-on from Chicago's Listen Ventures. The full circle is almost too neat: Roll had been the keynote speaker at a fitness event Chura organized, the event where Chura went looking for good non-alcoholic beer to hand out and found nothing. Roll's line about it was that he was there at the beginning.

It was Go's first outside capital. Chura had self-funded for four years first.

The growth curve, with the caveats attached

The argument Chura actually makes

He does not tell you to quit.

Ask him what non-alcoholic beer is for and he will give you two answers. The first is his own: it helped curb his habit of daily drinking, and he lost weight and got in shape for the first time in a decade.

The second is arithmetic, and it is the one that belongs on a bar menu.

Roughly 92 percent of people who buy non-alcoholic beverages also buy alcohol, and Chura is describing precisely what those people are doing with them.

One caution worth stating plainly, because Go's story runs close to it. Non-alcoholic beer is not a treatment for alcohol use disorder, and for some people in recovery the taste, the can, and the ritual are cues rather than substitutes. That is an individual medical question, not a marketing one. Anyone navigating it should talk to someone qualified rather than to a beverage company, and Go, to its credit, sells beer rather than advice.

Where to find it

The taproom is at 1665 Quincy Avenue in Naperville, with a live events stage, rotating food trucks, and a wellness calendar. There is a hidden door built into a bookcase that leads to the walk-in cooler, because of course there is.

Beyond that: more than 10,000 stores and restaurants, Wegmans among them, plus direct shipping to most states, a Beer of the Month club, and Amazon.

Chura's stated goal has never moved. Make the best non-alcoholic and low-alcohol craft beer on the planet. He said early on that the worst thing they could do was rush into it with poorly crafted beers.

Six years later, nobody is calling it a rush.