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Brew and Dilute– Just like the name suggests. Brew the beer, ferment, then dilute to get it down to the alcohol level you are shooting for (sorry for not using one of the more romantic terms, like expand or blend, but at least I didn’t say “water down”). There’s obviously a lot that needs to be considered regarding recipe: OG and attenuation, changes to adjunct or specialty malts, adjustments to hops, all of which need to be designed with the dilution in mind.

Let’s start by going through some of the more traditional methods for non-alcoholic beer production.  I don’t want to spend a lot of time on these. Many are simply variations on standard brewing with different steps or a different order of operations. If you are curious about how they typically taste, go find one of the OG NAs- feel free to steal that great name- like O’douls.

No fermentation – Essentially the idea was to use your wort as your finished product. There are three broad categories I’ll throw into this method.

• No pitch- Ideal when you don’t need to use yeast for a ‘beer’ label claim.
• Pitch and remove- The simplest way is to knockout, pitch, then immediately run the product to the centrifuge.
• Poor Yeast Conditions- Adjust oxygenation, sugar source, or nutrients — basically everything you shouldn’t do when brewing. Risky, but can work alongside other processes.

Two Brew– A combination of one of the methods above and a hop water brew to add bitterness, aroma, and use something other than water for your dilution. I like this method if you are using the same wort for both a session beer and an NA. It also lets your brewery add a hop water to your offerings, if you feel like there is a market for it.

Additions– The above methods with flavor adds, body adds, hop products.  

That’s our brief rundown of the conventional methods for NA production. It’s time to talk about the new processes. There are benefits and detriments to each one and I’m only writing on the processes that I have used myself. If there’s something not in this article that you think I should know about, I’d love to hear it. Please reach out to me.

 I can’t decide if it is obvious or confusing to use evaporation to remove alcohol from your beer, it probably depends on your relationship with distilling. This is a lot of the same process as distilling, but with some different constraints and goals. Depending on your (or more likely your contractor’s) equipment, this will involve using a combination of vacuum and surface area to minimize the energy use and keep product temperatures low, hopefully avoiding those oxidation notes we all try to avoid. The vacuum will limit oxygen ingress, stopping oxidation despite the increase in temperature. The product temperature will need to be higher than product release temp, around 75°F to 115°F, and you will end up losing your carbonation as a result.  The first question is always “Don’t you lose your volatiles (aroma) at the same time?”. The quick answer is “yes”, but some changes to the equipment or additions to it, depending on the manufacturer, can reduce those losses substantially. Another addition or change will allow you to keep the alcohol as well. Generally, the alcohol removed from the beer is not something I would recommend bottling and selling on its own, but an industrious and creative brewer (or distiller) may find a use for it.

This method does require specialized equipment, there’s no getting around that, but it doesn’t mean that it requires capital investment. Depending on where you are located, some of the equipment manufacturers can be contracted out to dealcoholize your product and then send it back to you for you to finish, package and distribute. Co-manufacturers, with the same capabilities, will do the same or give you the option to have them finish and ship it themselves with your brand on the package. It’s a practical route when space is at a premium or if transport of the product in bulk is cost or logistically prohibitive.

Membrane Filtration is another concentration method, sharing many of the same constraints and benefits as evaporation. It needs to be performed at or near room temperature, which means the CO2 will be lost as well as some loss of aroma and flavor volatiles. It requires either an equipment purchase or sending your beer out to a contractor to dealc your beer. As the name suggests, this is concentration by filtration rather than evaporation, but much more aggressive than your DE or sheet filter. By using high pressure (at least 300 psi), cross-flow filtration, and diafiltration, a brewer can remove ethanol selectively from a beer down to below detection limit (for those wanting to make a true 0.0% ABV product), depending on the method used. If you are trying to make a light non-alcoholic beer or something that is very technically precise, this is the method that I would recommend

Like evaporation, the benefit is control, with appropriate sampling and some benchtopping, it is possible to adjust your NA if something seems off, or lock in consistency once you’ve found the taste you want.

Both of the previous methods require more capital or logistics investment than most brewers want to take on for a new and uncertain product. It’s time to do what the brewers of old did— let biology take care of things for us. There are now yeast strains that are designed to be used at lower plato and finish fermenting around the NA threshold. There will usually need to be some expansion post-fermentation to make sure the product is within the 0.5% ABV target labeling, but the benefits of this process should be obvious.

There isn’t as much variety in non-alcoholic yeast as brewers are used to having.  You are mostly choosing between manufacturers, not for style at this point, but the industry is investing in research on this. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more strains out if the market for NA holds. Keeping your alcohol low and hitting your RE are going to be your main fermentation concerns, which may limit how much you’ll be able to play with temperature and yeast derived flavor production. Brewers are resourceful and there is always a way to tweak a few things post-fermentation, or pre-fermentation, as we’ll look at next.

 The role of kettle souring in non-alcoholic beer production is ingenious: The yeast can’t ferment sugar that isn’t there. If the lactic acid bacteria are using a portion of the sugar to produce acids instead of alcohol, you are getting a reduction in the worty quality of the beer without an increase in ABV.  Combining kettle souring and NA yeast fermentation gives a higher apparent degree of fermentation (ADF) than fermentation alone can achieve.  This means that some of that sugar is going to be used to produce lactic and other organic acids, but (as we’ll talk about later) a lower pH is going to help with your microbial stability and shelf life. This does mean that you’ll need to be careful about how long you sour, especially with certain styles. Discrepancies in taste are cumulative— when a customer already knows what your beer should taste like, even small flaws add up. If you are trying to make an NA stout and the body is already going to be thin, don’t add a sour note as well. Folks might not be able to pick out a little acidity or low body by themselves, but together they will at least note that “there’s something wrong with this beer”.  Still, this is one of the best ways I’ve found to reduce the ‘worty’ note so common in non-alcoholic beers, and it leaves plenty of style options open for experimentation      

I will freely admit that my time spent kettle souring is woefully lacking at the production level—something I plan to fix as soon as I have regular access to a brewery again. With regard to non-alcoholic beers, I think it’s a great way to take what brewers are already doing- using biology to make things for us- and pushing that idea one step further. Kettle souring is exactly what it sounds like— inoculate your wort with sour producing bacteria in the kettle, prior to your boil, leave it for a day or so, then proceed as you normally would. Your boil sterilizes your “contaminated” wort and you get the benefit of having a lower pH and those rounder sour notes that you can’t get solely from an acid addition.

I think of dry hopping as the obvious successor to using hop water to expand your NA. Depending on the method you are using to achieve 0.5% ABV, you might lose a fair amount of aroma— either to volatile loss or dilution. If you are basing your NA on one of your existing beers, you may find that your nascent NA is lacking the citrus or fruity notes of its alcoholic analog. This is a great way to get some of it back, supplement the aroma, or layer on some new hop notes with little to no bitterness added. Keeping that bitterness down is key on non-alcoholic beers where the bitterness is already going to be more pronounced, something that tends to happen in NA.

Most of the breweries I’ve worked with already have a practice in place for dry hopping, making this one of the easier ways to refine your NA. It is especially important to keep an eye on your alcohol and RE though, as any refermentation from hop creep can push you past your ABV specification. Generally, you are going to have a higher level of fermentable sugar left at the point of dry-hopping, resulting in a larger boost to alcohol. My recommendation is the same as my recommendation for any innovation work: Make sure you trial it a few times to get a range of possibilities. Adding more water is always an option, but working within the confines of non-alcoholic ABV limits means even small changes can shift RE or mouthfeel more than you expect.

I’m a big proponent of pairing dry-hopping with any of the methods of NA production, for most styles— not just IPAs. It doesn’t need to be aggressive; even a delicate hand on the hops can lend some depth to an otherwise unremarkable NA beer. If your goal is to match an existing beer, consider using varieties that are usually reserved for kettle additions. The difference may not stand out immediately, but anyone who is drinking an NA for the first time is looking for what’s not there. Don’t give them a chance to miss anything when you can avoid it.  

If you’ve chosen your method of NA production, found a style that works for it, kettle soured or dry-hopped to give it a leg up, and it still doesn’t taste like you want in the bright tank, don’t fret. There is still more that can be done. You can add body, drop the pH, or enhance the esters with a few well-chosen additions. I’ll note that aseptic technique and good manufacturing practices will be very important if you go this route. There will be some sugar left for any contaminant that is introduced at this stage and, if you aren’t pasteurizing, you’ll need to rely on pH and the antimicrobial effect of hops to inhibit beer spoiler growth. It may not be worth it for everyone, but most of the best brewers I know are perfectionists— and they will find ways to make their beer exactly what they want it to be.

If you are high on pH (we’ll go over the importance of this in the next section, spoiler: it’s about spoilers), there are several acids you can use to bring it down. My recommendation is lactic; it’s efficient, familiar,  and has a more beer-native acidity. Use citric only if you’re aiming for a specific flavor profile— something juicy or citrus fruit forward. As always, be very careful when you are working with acids, both for safety and dosing accuracy. No one is giving out cool points to brewers who aren’t using PPE, and, at the end of the day, we want to see everyone get home safe. If you can titrate a sample of your beer prior to your acid add, do that. With pH adjustments, it’s incredibly easy to overshoot your target and hard to bring it back after that.

The easiest way I’ve found to add body is with maltodextrin. Yeast typically can’t ferment maltodextrin (the exception being those diastaticus strains), meaning you won’t get an alcohol bump from their addition if any yeast remains. That said, if you are using a diastaticus strain in your brewery, treat it as a serious contamination risk for your NA. At the level maltodextrin should be used for a body add, it won’t impart sweetness, which you’ll be trying to limit in your NA anyway, but can raise your mouthfeel up a bit if your product tastes thin. I have found that it makes the beer taste artificial if you use too much though— moderation is key.

Lastly, and usually most unpopular, you can always take a page out of the traditional NA brewers playbook and add some flavoring. Depending on your volume, you can have a flavor house make a specific blend of flavor compounds tailored to your beer. It can take some time to figure out what you want and at which levels, but flavor chemists are very good at what they do. If you want something simple, like isoamyl acetate with a bit of mouthfeel enhancer (body modifier), there’s a flavor house that can do that for you, for a price. One final note: depending on what you add and where it’s derived from, you may need to label the product accordingly. That’s often a deal-breaker for craft brewers in my experience, and I understand why.  

The goal of a well-made NA should be the same as any well-made beer: make something that tastes good. That’s very reductive— but it’s also true. It points to a common problem that I’ve seen with NA producers. Not that they don’t make good tasting NAs (some don’t), but that they have a different frame of reference for NAs.

“This is pretty good- for an NA.”

“Well, it’s always going to have that NA taste, but it’s close enough.”

“That’s what NAs are supposed to taste like.”

These statements were fine when we didn’t have the tools to make non-alcoholic beer taste like alcoholic beer, but it feels defeatist to start producing something assuming that it is going to have some flaws in it. Give yourselves some more credit. The first step is to know what the common mistakes are and how to avoid them.

The most glaring issue with a lot of NA beer on the market today, and the most frequent that I’ve seen across the board, is that the NA still tastes worty. Methional should be a familiar smell to all brewers, it’s what gives away the lie in many of the early NA beers. It presents as a sweet, caramel, malt extract flavor and aroma and can be noticed both on the nose and in an unbalanced sweetness. This is due to incomplete fermentation, usually something intentional in NA production, but can be minimized with the right recipe and processes. The key is in finding the correct yeast/OG if you are using an NA yeast or watching your attenuation if you are processing out the alcohol. This is more difficult in some styles than others but there are ways to hide, use, or eliminate the methional. If you’d like some suggestions, please reach out to me on this website or at SeanFlynn@solutionsbeverage.com. Keeping hot-side oxidation low when you can will help reduce your methional precursors as well.

The less known issue, and one that I’m still seeing even from the big players in the NA industry involves bitterness. I don’t hear this spoken of very much, but your bitterness in an NA is going to be different than in an alcoholic beer. Anytime you change something in a beer or a brew, there will be unforeseen consequences, some of which are downstream from the brew or in finished product. NA production is no different. Removing alcohol and fermentation byproducts changes how bitterness presents in NA beer, much to the surprise of brewers new to the category. Luckily, a simple recipe change or ingredient change is usually enough to negate any ill effects.

For those of you that have ABV/ABW targets that are your guiding star for specifications, don’t forget to monitor RE as well. If you are already doing this, great! and even better if you are watching ratio (extract/alcohol). The ratio of your beer tells you much more about the balance and body of your beer than one metric alone can— especially in non-alcoholic beer. Being precise with all of your targets makes a difference between “good for an NA” and good.

These hurdles may require some trial and error to leap over, but the lessons from them can be applied to any future NA beers to minimize the prototyping phase. With that accomplished, we can focus on the simple things, like hitting targets for specifications and flavor profile. The biggest piece of advice that I can give aspiring NA producers is— watch your vessel temperatures. Unlike your alcoholic products, an NA will freeze, and when it does, you are stuck with out-of-spec product, lower volume, and the choice between waiting for it to thaw or compromising quality (and adding an extra step) by diluting it back to specifications.

There have been a number of studies conducted on micro stability and the organisms that are found in NA beers (please reach out if you want specifics), and it seems clear— there is much more microbial diversity than in alcoholic beer, including, startlingly E. coli and Salmonella. That seems obvious based on numerous changes: we’ve removed one of the key inhibitors (alcohol), usually removed or stymied any yeast that could outcompete bacteria, and added more risk of infection with increased processing steps or additions. While I don’t expect many folks to end up with MRSA in their kegs, assuming basic GMP (good manufacturing practices), there is justification for treating NAs more like food products than beer.

Preventing contamination is the best way to limit risk, but none of us brew in a biohazard lab. Luckily, there are ways to improve micro stability and research has been done to set some guidelines for aspiring NA brewers. A solid hygiene program and quality control plan are your best weapons— but your new best friend will be pH. Most beer- and human- spoiling bacteria that are inhibited by alcohol are also suppressed at lower pH. Research suggests keeping pH below 4.6, and I would recommend aiming for below 4.2 if you can manage it without compromising flavor. There are a few ways to achieve this, and I leave it up to brewers to pick their desired method or acid addition.

Additives are another promising route for improving micro stability. The beverage space offers more additive options, most of which I would not recommend for use in beer. Sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate both require label claims. I haven’t tested them in beer myself and can’t speak to the flavor impact, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has tried them. Similarly, potassium metabisulfite will likely push SO2 levels past the sulfite claim requirements and add unwanted sulfur notes to the beer.

The two additives I have been hearing the most about recently are Velcorin and Chiber. From my own experience working with Chiber I would recommend it if you want to make a non-alcoholic beer with great clarity, as it cleared up some of the haze in the last beer I produced using it. There are some limitations to the beer styles and uses for each of these but can potentially extend shelf life and work in conjunction with hygiene and pH to prevent infection.

I know I’m in the minority and that this take often makes me unpopular in the brewing circles, but pasteurizing makes things easier.  The benefits of owning a pasteurizer, even a flash, are growing by the day. If it is something that you have been on the fence about and you have the means and space— buy a pasteurizer. It is a tool that gives you both capability and peace of mind. For those of you who might want to step into the beverage or NA or THC space, it will make things easier in the long run. Pasteurization can affect flavor, depending on dissolved oxygen, beer style, and chemical interactions. But infection affects flavor too, and I’d rather have a change I chose, especially when it comes with greater capability now and in the future.

I know I’m in the minority and that this take makes me unpopular in the brewing circles, but pasteurizing makes things easier.  The benefits of owning a pasteurizer, even a flash, are growing by the day and if it is something that you have been on the fence about, I hope this endorsement pushes you in that direction. If you have the means and space, buy a pasteurizer. It is just a tool that gives you increased capability and increased peace of mind. For those of you who might want to step into the beverage or NA or THC space, it will make things easier in the long run. Anything with increased sugar has an increased risk of microbial contamination.

There is something sacred about brewing. I remember falling in love with the traditions, its many styles, and the challenge of it. Humanity has been brewing beer for millennia and we’re still finding new ways to make beer— new styles, new techniques— and the continued innovation of non-alcoholic beer is proof. As Bill Coors said, “There are no sacred cows”. NA beer is not a departure from craft— it’s another style finding its voice.

If you aren’t brewing NAs yet — or you’re unsure whether they fit your brand — drop me a note or send me an email. I love talking with brewers and beverage folks and will happily go on about beer and NAs for as long as someone lets me. And if something in this article doesn’t seem right, or you just want to dig deeper into any of these topics, please reach out. I don’t have all the answers, but I always enjoy the conversation.