Curiousity: N/A Beer

Not that I am remotely interesting in brewing a non-alcoholic beer, but I was wondering today how you'd go about it. Does anyone have any idea? The only thing I could come up with is potentially mashing a really low gravity beer (like a final gravity... except original) and not fermenting at all (thus avoiding alcohol). You could shoot for like a 1.012 and then add the normal amount of hops. Would that taste anything like beer?

Purely for curiosity's sake. If anyone knows, I'd be interested to hear how big brewers go about making their NA beers. :cross: :cross:

I'll keep mine with alcohol though, thank you very much.

search the ag forum...there was a post about brewing a n/a beer with a pretty good link to an article with additional info.

If I remember correctly, I think they actually boil the alcohol off somehow?

Vacuum distillation using waste heat from the brewing process is the most common method for removing alcohol from beer commercially.

Friend of mine makes NA beer all the time for his dad. He does a normal AG recipe, then boils off the etoh. You don't actually have to bring it to a rolling boil. Alcohols (of which there are many) are usually all gone by the time it hits 200F. Just keep it at that temp for a short period, like 15 minutes. He usually dry hops after that, and force carbonates in kegs