Two Friendly Ghosts from Over-the-Rhine
Some ghosts rattle chains. These two just want to hand you a cold one that won’t slow you down. Ghost Pils and Ghost Haze are Rhinegeist’s nonalcoholic beers, and the name is a play on the “geist” in Rhinegeist, which means ghost or spirit. The brewery’s pitch is simple: ghost on booze, not on flavor. Both come in under 0.5% ABV. CEO Adam Bankovich describes them as the answer for moments when beer is the perfect drink but alcohol might not be. Rhinegeist made them with Sustainable Beverage Technologies using its BrewVo process, which is built to keep full craft flavor without the alcohol.
Ghost Pils is the crisp one, with smooth, bready malts and a light, clean finish. It made an early splash, picking up a bronze medal at the 2025 Great American Beer Festival. Ghost Haze is the juicy one. It pours bright gold with heavy haze and a thick white head, and delivers big stone fruit and fresh citrus notes on a full, juice-like body. Rhinegeist says it tastes much closer to a regular hazy IPA than older NA beers, which often leaned too sweet and came up short on hop flavor. Both launched in August 2025 and are now year-round releases in six-packs of 12-ounce cans across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
A Brewery Built in a Pre-Prohibition Bottling Plant
Rhinegeist was founded by Bob Bonder and Bryant Goulding, who met in 2005 while working as business consultants in San Francisco. In August 2011 Bonder called Goulding with an idea for a brewery in Cincinnati, a city he saw as a vacuum for locally brewed craft beer. They brought in head brewer Jim Matt, a chemist for 20 years before he moved into beer at Sun King Brewery in Indianapolis. Their flagship, Truth IPA, began as one of Matt’s homebrew projects.
The building made the brand. It was built more than a century ago as a Christian Moerlein bottling plant and closed in 1919 because of Prohibition, which is where the name Rhinegeist, or ghost of the Rhine, came from. Goulding said his first look inside felt like walking into a cathedral. Rhinegeist opened on June 29, 2013, and more than 2,000 beer lovers turned out for the debut. It has since become a regional heavyweight, with a mid-20s percentage share of craft beer in the Cincinnati market, and it remains independently owned with no parent company and no outside investors.
Any Real Ghosts?
The honest answer is that the brewery’s ghost is more tribute than haunting, and there are no well-documented sightings in the taproom. The “Rhine” part of the name comes from the old saying that German workers were “crossing the Rhine” when they walked across the canal into downtown, and “geist” honors those immigrants. The neighborhood itself has plenty of spooky lore, though. By the 1860s there were 36 breweries in Over-the-Rhine making 30 million gallons of beer a year, and many left behind lagering tunnels deep underground. Nobody knows how many there are because riots in the 1880s burned the County Courthouse and destroyed most records, but about a dozen have been found so far. Local ghost tours stop at Rhinegeist to talk about hauntings in the area, calling it one of the last remaining pieces of the old Christian Moerlein Brewery, before heading down into tunnels 30 feet below the street.
So grab a Ghost Pils or a Ghost Haze, head up to the rooftop deck, and raise a can to the Moerlein bottlers who worked here before Prohibition shut the doors.
Address: 1910 Elm St., Cincinnati, OH 45202
Website: https://rhinegeist.com