Boozeless Beer

Howdy,

For the last year at least, a particular Euro/UK-centered alcohol industry news site that I like to read has been awash with two stories: that of the Seltzer craze, and that of Non-Alcoholic beer’s growing market share. While the common thread between these, and a plethora of other stories, is the purported health-consciousness of newly come-of-age drinkers, the latter’s interesting to me in particular because it seems more like a theory than a reality. 

While NA beer, and even NA gin, are big and growing items across the Atlantic, apparently, the same (anecdotally) doesn’t seem to be entirely true here. While the number of options are growing, including the pretty fantastic Brooklyn Brewery Special Effects NA Hoppy Lager, there are a fairly large number of craft beer bars without an NA option - on reflection, those are perhaps the only bars I can think of that consistently lack the option.

So what gives? Why don’t they make their own, and why couldn’t they just, you know, boil the wort and just chill and carbonate that?

Let’s find out.

An Almost Unprofessionally Brief Summary of Fermentation

We can start by asking the question backwards, in a sense - how does the alcohol get into the beer in the first place? I’m sure you know the story - yeast eat sugar, produce alcohol, et voila (I can’t for the life of me find the backwards ´). And that’s a pretty reasonable summary, but we’ll add a few details.

First of all, why do yeast make alcohol, or esters for that reason? The short answer (read: the answer that doesn’t require me to Google it or look through a book), is that yeast really just want what we want: to reproduce recklessly, and push off death for as far as possible. It does this by eating the sugars in wort (boiled barley water, remember?) almost perfectly in order of how easy they are to eat (like, they eat 90%+ of the simplest monosaccharide first). “Eating,” here, turns out to be insanely complicated, because they don’t just split the sugar molecules up into atoms and rip them apart like a nuclear reactor, they use enzymes to break down these sugars into simpler compounds, quite often through a complicated chain of compounds that may taste good, and may taste bad.

This is one reason that lagers are usually cleaner than ales - the lager strains, partially due to genetics (right?), and partially due to the fact that colder biological processes happen more slowly (callback) are a bit more “careful” to really burn through all of the intermediaries step-by-step initially, and lagering (which can partially be thought of as the process of forcing yeast to search for food in a relatively fuel-poor medium, finished beer, though non-yeast processes are at work as well) induces them to circle back and “eat” as much of those leftover intermediaries as they can. A caveat: I’m pretty sure this is all true, but my books are all in storage (I may have mentioned that a few times), but I leave it to the diligent and knowledgeable among you to refute or tacitly affirm these technical details.

Implicit in this diatribe is the fact that ethanol (alcohol, hooch, firewater), is one such intermediary (indeed, one possible metabolismic end of the line for most organisms), and that yeast produce it because they have to, in a sense, or that it’s the molasses to yeast’s cane sugar. We just happen to love the stuff, and have spent a few thousand years befriending all manner of yeasts, and, prior to modern filtration, slinging back by the quadrillions. Wild, right? Dark even?

And there’s one more salient, topical note: biotransformation. As hoppy beers, especially dry-hopped beers continue to dominate the industry (looking at you, Hazies), the interaction between yeast and hops to create compounds not originally present in the hop flowers grows in importance, and is an active field of study. I know nothing about it, and for the sake of this article, you just have to know that yeast changes hop flavors, so if you want to mimic the flavor of beer, you have to accomplish this biotransformation somehow.

Put that all together, and you might start a pretty good idea of why mimicking an NA beer without fermenting it might be quite difficult. First of all, wort has all this sugar, which is crucial for hop flavors for reasons not worth getting into (so you can’t dilute those sugars out, say), and yeast burn through that. Second, during fermentation, yeast make a whole host of flavors for a whole host of reasons (we covered esters last time, but that absolutely comes into play here). Finally, even hop character gets altered by yeast during fermentation.

So making beer without the yeast is more or less impossible. So how in the heck do they get the alcohol out of beer without wrecking it? And like decaf coffee, the bar for NA beer used to be low, but Heineken 0.0 and Brooklyn Special Effects rock; are they using some other newfangled trick?

The Growing Field of Choices

Time was, I suspect, distillation was your only option, but nowadays, there are a growing number of ways to produce non-alcoholic beer without applying a BTU of heat, and we’ll run through them with the lazy blogger’s favorite tool: bullet point lists (in fairness, I think it’s the most efficient tool here, which speaks to the length of the list of options!). Without further ado:

Distillation

What is distillation, first of all? The basic idea is to heat up a liquid and redirect the vapors away from the hot kettle, say, and into a condenser, which condenses whatever vapors are present. Hop oils are captured precisely this way - by condensing the steam coming off of the boil kettle.

This is, as I’m sure you know, the trick used to make spirits like whiskey, which is distilled from a beer-like “wash.” The ethanol in the wash has a lower boiling point than water, so it boils off first; capturing that ethanol (but not some gnarly compounds that have an even lower boiling point than ethanol, like the infamous methanol) is what allows us to make strong spirits. A note: If you were to just capture every last drop of vapor, you’d eventually get back what you started with, and it’s this pickiness, this disinterest in watery hooch or poisonous methanol, that leads to the heads/hearts/tails system.

And there’s one more relevant trick: since those boiling points are determined by the ambient pressure in the still, if you lower that pressure, you can distill under vacuum to pull the ethanol off of beer at a lower temperature, and doing so does less harm to the flavors of beer - think the milk in a latter vs boiled milk. So the idea is to simmer beer at as low a temperature/as high a pressure as possible until enough ethanol has evaporated, and then chill and carbonate the result.

One issue with that is that, as mentioned, anything flavorful with a lower boiling point than ethanol is boiled off as well; in theory you could capture most of that and return it to the NA beer down the line, and evidently that’s probably a thing done sometimes.

Finally, there’s another rad application of distillation under vacuum in the cocktail world, but that’s another blog entirely

Membranes

Thanks to thermodynamics, if you put a semi-permeable membrane (like a microscopic tennis net) in the middle of a swimming pool, say, that has holes too small for some compound, drain some of the water out of one half, and then let the water levels of each side come back to the same point, the side you drained will have less of the compound than the other side. That fact is kind of obvious, but what’s more subtle is the number of ways you can produce that gradient (which is to say, that concentration difference) without draining one of the pools; doing pretty much anything to one side, like cooling it down or pressing down on it (and thus increasing the pressure) will do the trick. Even better, if you start out with these two pool halves and then add some of that substance to just one side, it’ll actually pull water from the other side, “permanently” raising its water line relative to the other. That’s wild.

Anyway, that trick is used all the time in creating nice, clean water for brewing from any ol’ tap water. If you pick a filter that can trap the stuff in tap water that you don’t want, and are willing to throw away the salty concentrate you end up with as a byproduct, you can create pretty much arbitrarily saltless water with a sufficiently powerful RO filter.

But it’s also relevant here: if you had a filter that trapped anything smaller than ethanol, which, being a simple compound, as you’d expect for an end-product, is also fairly small molecularly, you could filter the alcohol and water (which, being smaller than ethanol, is also pulled off), and then add clean water back to the end product. Neato!

You could also just use a standard RO filter we use to pull minerals from our brewing water in order to pull the water off of the beer, distill off the ethanol from that concentrate as above, and then add the water back. This minimizes the time, and possibly the amount of energy it takes to heat the resulting beer concentrate (“possibly” because it takes energy to separate those out, of course).

Punking the Yeast

You can also make like Ashton Kutcher and pull a wicked fast one on the yeast in order to get some of those nice fermentation byproducts we’d like without the unnecessary alcohol. There are basically three ways to do this: use fundamentally different yeast, play around with the wort you give them, or cut off fermentation early. This is also a good time to mention the endless font of knowledge driving much of this section, which is this sick post - I’ll certainly grab some Grüvi next time I see some.

While I’m unaware of a mass-produced ethanol-free yeast, some strides appear to be being made in the background, and in labs. One particular strain can’t can’t even eat maltose - guess how that sugar got its name! So, while these are new and will probably take a moment to fully catch on, just like the “democratization” of lactobacillus strains and Kveik, access to these is both inevitable as demand increases, and sure to impact the craft brewing scene, particularly if you, dear readers, pay them to do so!

You can also, more simply, just interrupt or meddle with fermentation, using the same yeast you normally would. This has a cool historical angle, since barley used to be poorly “modified,” which is to say they didn’t really understand how to best prepare malt for yeast, which meant that a significant portion of the “gravity” in some of these early beers (read: things that increase the liquid’s density, generally sugars) wouldn’t have been fermentable by standard brewing yeast. This is basically the story behind early Bocks, which were liquid fuel for monks during Lent, they say. 

Which is to say, by carefully planning your grain bill, mash temperatures, etc, you can give the yeast very little of that ideal monosaccharide fuel to work with, meaning body and fermentation without much alcohol.

Another “easy” option is to just rapidly chill the beer once the yeast start making appreciable amounts of alcohol. That way, you get some of those fermentation flavors without alcohol, which is, as mentioned, the last step in the fermentation process more or less. Granted, some alcohol is produced rather quickly in beer, since the yeast produce it as they eat, which is to say for the bulk of fermentation, so this isn’t something you can wait a week to do - I’d suspect 12-48 hours, probably on the lower side

Finally, a surprise fourth option particularly well-suited to homebrewers: you could just literally water down beer. This probably wouldn’t work so well with an IPA or a Stout, but if you were to carefully make something like a Leichtbier (a baby Helles, basically), you might not totally kill it by watering it down 2:1, which would yield a sub-2% beer.

Conclusion

While making NA beer is clearly pretty tough no matter how you go about it, and certainly tougher than brewing normal beer, I think it’s a wonderful alternative to the hard stuff for those of us who like to take breaks from the hooch, global implications aside. In any case, just like Hard Seltzers and Hazies, it’ll probably start to pay to make one, judging by the sea changes across the pond and the bet that Brooklyn Brewery has placed on it, so don’t be too surprised if you see it pop up at craft breweries in the next few years.

And in the meantime, we finally got our Nitro Cold Brew sign back up, so you can get your NA fix the old fashion way at MacLeod!

Cheers,

Adrian “The Abstainer” Febre