Non-Alcoholic brew?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

God Emporer BillyBrew

Well-Known Member
Joined
Sep 26, 2005
Messages
1,508
Reaction score
17
Location
Melnibone
I've read that you can make non-alcoholic beer by cooking it in the oven for a while. Have any of you tried or even heard of this? A good friend of mine can't drink and is always bummed out by the lack of decent NA beers. And I always feel bad when I take his wife a sample of my latest HB and don't have anything to give him.
 
well, i think what they mean is that you are taking beer that is done and ready for consumption, and then heating it up to cook off the alcohol. (alcohol boils at a lower temp than water.)

this will leave you with non-alcoholic, flat, hot beer.

you can chill it down, but it will still be flat.

-walker
 
well.. not really. you would kill the yeast when you heated it up, and you would still end up with flat beer.

If you kegged it and force carbonated it, it might work.

-walker
 
hmmmm/............


maybe if you heated it up and killed all the yeast (and removed the alcohol) you could add priming sugar and more yeast when you bottle.

you would get a *little* alcohol in the final product, but probably something less than 0.5%.

-walker
 
Yeah that sounds right. Boil out the alcohol and just prime the bottles.
 
Maybe this recipe will help:

Designated Driver Dunkel (Non-Alcoholic Amber)

Size: 5 U.S. Gallons
Ingredients:
6½ lbs. Amber Malt Extract
¼ lbs. Crystal Malt 10°L
14 HBU Cascade Hops
3 HBU Mt. Hood Hops Whole Leaf
1 pkg. Wyeast American Ale
OG: 1.040
FG: 1.008 (before boiling off the alcohol)

The night before brewing, boil 2½ gallon of water to a boil for 5 minutes. Then take off the heat, cool and put into the refrigerator or in an ice chest with ice overnight to chill.

Just before it is time to brew, pour the cold (boiled) water into the primary. Fill the kettle with 2½ gallons of water and start heating. In a saucepan, steep Crystal Malt in cheesecloth bag for 20 minutes in 1 quart 160°F water. Add liquid to 2½ gal water boiling in the brew kettle with the extract. Bring to a vigorous boil for 15 minutes. Add the Cascade hops and continue the boil for 45 minutes. Remove from heat and cool quickly to 100°F and then add to the cold water in the primary. Shake it to oxygenate it well. You can check the temp. It should be right around 70°F and ready to pitch. Pitch the yeast and let it ferment.

After 6 days, rack into the secondary carboy. With the Wyeast Amer. Ale, I still had a noticeable ferment going in the secondary. On Day 12, take the Mt. Hood hops and tie them into a cheesecloth satchel. Bring 1 qt. of water to a boil and add the hop packet. Let it continue to boil for 2 minutes, if the hops are compressed pretty tight from the vacuum sealed bag, you may have to prod it a bit to get the boiling water into the inside. Remove from heat and put the pot into an ice bath until it is nice and cool. Pour the whole thing, Hop packet and all, into a sterilized glass or plastic container and put into the refrigerator until it is needed. You will use it at kegging time. On day 16, siphon the beer from the secondary into the brewpot. Careful to keep the racking tube above the sediment. Begin heating on a medium heat monitoring the temperature. Ethanol boils at a lower temp than water so it will stabilize temperature at about 180°F as the latent heat of the alcohol uses up the heat energy. Keep the heat at a level that the boil is consistent but not violent. Watch the temp. As the volume of alcohol reduces, the temperature will rise. When the temp has reached 210°F, most of the alcohol has boiled away and the bit more will evaporate as it cools. Have a window open, you will be boiling off a quart of alcohol. You will notice that the boil will almost instantaneously turn from very fine bubble foam to a rolling boil at the point that the alcohol has boiled out.

Note: if you are above sea level, these temps will be lower. Don't wait to hit 210°F or by the time you do, you will have some real malty syrup for your pancakes. As soon as the boil is done, cool quickly and keg. Add the Hop water that you made a few days earlier, leaving the hop packet behind. Carbonate artificially in the keg and let settle for a week. You could prime and repitch to carbonate in bottles but that would add alcohol to the beer but at most, it would be ½%.

Notes: This beer turned out excellent. Noticeable flavor absent that I assume was the alcohol. Also, the viscosity in your mouth was different than a beer containing alcohol. And the beer was a bit hazy, like chill haze, but being that it was a dark beer, it was not very obvious. Next time I make it, and I plan on that soon, I will probably add some dextrin or increase the Crystal malt to closer to ½ lbs. just for more body and steep the finishing hops for a much longer time. The temperature that they were steeped at probably was too cold for good hop utilization. Also, I will not hop at all with the original wort. I have a feeling that the haze is partially from the re-boiling of the hopped beer. I will boil the hops in the same water that I will steep the finishing hops in and get a good 45-minute boil with them.

Good luck,
Wild
 
Hey, that is great info. Thanks! I really want to make him a couple of bottles each time and it sounds like this recipe will work fine that way. I think that the commercial NA beers have a bit of alcohol anyway, so that should be fine, huh?
 
A commercial NA beer can have up to 0.5 % ABV. If you've never had Near Beer, it's one of the oldest and probably the best of the breed. I suspect because it originated before fizzy yellow snow melt dominated the market.
 
wild said:
Next time I make it, and I plan on that soon, I will probably add some dextrin or increase the Crystal malt to closer to ½ lbs. just for more body ...

I'd be curious to hear how this comes out. I don't have an especial interest in NA beer so I probably won't be making a whole batch of it, but I suspect that adding some non-fermentable sugars like maltodextrin and/or lactose could really improve the body and, especially if you're using a dark-ish malt profile, make it taste almost "normal."

Also, force-carbonating instead of bottle-conditioning would really keep the ethanol content to a minimum, no? Not that you should buy a kegging set up just for this purpose... just throwin' it out there.
 
It's that his life can't handle it. If you know what I mean! He's 12 steps away from drinking.

I bottled the other night and didn't make any for him. I feel kinda bad about it, but I'll make it up to him. I only had about an hour and a half and just couldn't fit it in there. I'll get him next time.
 
Is there any follow up on this recipe, and / or modifications?

I have a use for, and an interest in a *good* NA beer. All NA beer that I have tried is nothing like the real thing, nor is it particularly attractive tasting to me, unlike good beer.

Decaf coffee is very close, by contrast.
 
I did a batch of Oatmeal stout and racked off about 2 gal of it to cook off. I just put it in my boil kettle and cooked it. In theory it will not get above 170 with any alcohol in it. It turned out ok. I tasted a little cooked but I think that was because I let it got to a boil. I then Keged it and bottled it from the keg.
 
It's that his life can't handle it. If you know what I mean! He's 12 steps away from drinking.

I bottled the other night and didn't make any for him. I feel kinda bad about it, but I'll make it up to him. I only had about an hour and a half and just couldn't fit it in there. I'll get him next time.

If you wanted to make very low alcohol beer for yourself, I'd say try it. However, you have no way of knowing how much alcohol is left in your beer, so giving it to your friend may risk his sobriety.

If you still really want to, you should probably explain that fact to him first, and ask what affect that my have on his recovery. Then you can decide if you still want to carry through with it.

Edit: I didn't realize that the original post was that old. However my thoughts are the same for anyone considering brewing a "NA" beer for someone that is a recovering alcoholic!
 
hmm... good info guys... I have a buddy at work who is diabetic and as a result can not do much drinkin as the alcohol messes with his blood sugar in a bad way.... I might have to boil him up a few bottles one of these days.....

could one use those carbonation drops at bottling time? (I've never used 'em but I've seen 'em and been curious about 'em)
 
In theory it will not get above 170 with any alcohol in it.

Let's ignore the fact that the alcohol is dissolved in the water.

If you heat up water to 212 F, is it all gone? If not, why would you expect alcohol to have this property of being all gone once the boiling point is reached?
 
remilard,

Please advise your best guess at a procedure to reboil fermented beer to remove alcohol. Much appreciate the help. I'm trying to achieve NA or close to it. I plan to experiment with 1.5 gallons this week, out of 5+ gallons of American Wheat (OG was 048) which I have in my secondary (I wasn't going to secondary it but I needed the primary for a new boil & it turns out that the yeast clearly were aroused so it's not a bad thing.) Thanks.
 
Let's ignore the fact that the alcohol is dissolved in the water.

If you heat up water to 212 F, is it all gone? If not, why would you expect alcohol to have this property of being all gone once the boiling point is reached?

It's this weird thing called science. Alcohol and water are miscible, and when together they azeotrope. This mean that they boil off together, at a different boiling temperature than either of the original substances, which can be intermediate between the two, or in fact lower than both. In this case, ethanol boils at 78.5C, water at 100C, and the two azeotrope at 78.2C. In addition, the gas phase from the azeotrope contains 95.4 percent ethanol, and 4.6 water. This is the reason ethanol cannot be distilled to a higher percentage than 95% (that is, unless you then azeotrope off that water using benzene, which ultimately leaves trace benzene, an aggressive carcinogen in the remaining absolute ethanol). What this means of course, is that the boiling point of ANY water/ethanol solution is 78.2C. So since the temperature of this solution cannot rise about 79C until all of the ethanol is gone, this is an easy way to know. Of course, the caveat to all of this is that these boiling points will all be slightly elevated because of the dissolved small molecules (residual sugars, etc) that make the water/ethanol mixture beer.
 
It's this weird thing called science. Alcohol and water are miscible, and when together they azeotrope. This mean that they boil off together, at a different boiling temperature than either of the original substances, which can be intermediate between the two, or in fact lower than both. In this case, ethanol boils at 78.5C, water at 100C, and the two azeotrope at 78.2C. In addition, the gas phase from the azeotrope contains 95.4 percent ethanol, and 4.6 water. This is the reason ethanol cannot be distilled to a higher percentage than 95% (that is, unless you then azeotrope off that water using benzene, which ultimately leaves trace benzene, an aggressive carcinogen in the remaining absolute ethanol). What this means of course, is that the boiling point of ANY water/ethanol solution is 78.2C. So since the temperature of this solution cannot rise about 79C until all of the ethanol is gone, this is an easy way to know. Of course, the caveat to all of this is that these boiling points will all be slightly elevated because of the dissolved small molecules (residual sugars, etc) that make the water/ethanol mixture beer.

Nice book report, but none of it is relevant and most of it is incorrect.

First off, the boiling point of an azeotrope is never between the boiling points of any of its constituents.

However, beer (~95% water ~5% ethanol) is not an azeotrope. Distilling beer will result in a distillate that is nearer to the water/ethanol azeotrope than the beer, meaning the remaining beer is now more different from the azeotrope than it started and therefore the mixture will never be an azeotrope. Try reading wikipedia sober next time, skippy.
 
Nice book report, but none of it is relevant and most of it is incorrect.

First off, the boiling point of an azeotrope is never between the boiling points of any of its constituents.

However, beer (~95% water ~5% ethanol) is not an azeotrope. Distilling beer will result in a distillate that is nearer to the water/ethanol azeotrope than the beer, meaning the remaining beer is now more different from the azeotrope than it started and therefore the mixture will never be an azeotrope. Try reading wikipedia sober next time, skippy.

Hey ****head, I'm a chemist. It is completely relevant, and I certainly don't need wikipedia to know what an azeotrope is. You are correct the an the T of an azeotrope will not be between the two bps; it is either below them both or above them both. Regardless, if you heat a solution of water/ethanol (which, as you seem to not be aware, beer is), then it ALWAYS will boil at the boiling point of the azeotrope, which is 78.2C. The vapor phase will ALWAYS be 95.5% ethanol and 4.5% water. The boiling point of an azeotrope is constant and does not change according to the composition of the remaining liquid as long as both components remain, skippy.
 
Mkade, don't mind our resident troll, remilard. 459 posts to date, and ~450 of them are blatant troll attempts. Just don't feed him, and eventually he'll go away.
 
Hey ****head, I'm a chemist. It is completely relevant, and I certainly don't need wikipedia to know what an azeotrope is. You are correct the an the T of an azeotrope will not be between the two bps; it is either below them both or above them both. Regardless, if you heat a solution of water/ethanol (which, as you seem to not be aware, beer is), then it ALWAYS will boil at the boiling point of the azeotrope, which is 78.2C. The vapor phase will ALWAYS be 95.5% ethanol and 4.5% water. The boiling point of an azeotrope is constant and does not change according to the composition of the remaining liquid as long as both components remain, skippy.

Thats wrong for beer and correct for an azeotrope, which beer is not.

How could the distillate of a 95% water and 5% ethanol mixture possibly always be 95% ethanol and 5% water?
 
Nevermind the fact that, according to your failed logic, all spirits would be 190 proof unless they are diluted.

I may be dumb, but the fact that you can't understand that you are wrong about the composition of beer distillate is staggering.
 
If we can't have a civil discussion without namecalling and snide remarks, SKIPPY, then the thread will be closed.

I'm not your mother, I'm not going to follow everyone around asking you all to behave. Act like adults, be civil, stop with the sarcasm, and no namecalling. Or find a new playroom.
 
Nevermind the fact that, according to your failed logic, all spirits would be 190 proof unless they are diluted.

I may be dumb, but the fact that you can't understand that you are wrong about the composition of beer distillate is staggering.

They are diluted. How do you think whiskey is made?
 
I thought that was how gin and vodka were made. Irish Whiskey is made by leprachans, Canadian Rye whiskey is made by Sasquatches. (That's why they are so hard to find).

Rum is made by voodo witches.
This would explain why Jack Daniels is so short. He could just be a tall leprechauns. I'm always hearing that us Americans are a tall bunch.
 
After the alcohol is evaporated, you could carb the beer with this: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJD0bv9kLAQ]YouTube - How to Make A Carbonation Cap[/ame]
 
I'm going to have to agree with remilard here. When distilling an ethanol water mixture the vapor fraction won't always be 95% ethanol 5% water, the composition of the vapor phase will depend on the composition of the liquid phase. Eventually, with successive distillation, the liquid gets purer and purer in ethanol and approaches the azeotrope point at which point the vapor phase and the liquid phase have the same composition, and thus no further distillation can occur.
 
http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipe...m.png/300px-PositiveAzeotropePhaseDiagram.png

For a little more of a description assuming a composition of A, when it is heated up the liquid comes into equilibrium with the vapor at composition point B. If this vapor is condensed off it will now be a liquid of composition C (the same as B). This process repeats itself for D and E, and you keep going until you get to the azeotrope (the dip in the graph). At this point the vapor has the exact same composition as the liquid, and thus no further distillation is possible.
 
Yeah, all this pointless fighting is stupid, a quick google search or having taken a chemistry class every semester for the past several years (good times) will tell you the answer.

Examine closely this graph to verify. File:Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium Mixture of Ethanol and Water.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The bottom line is the line of liquid composition, and as we are not talking about distilling the solution and condensing the vapor, you just start at your original boiling temp and follow the bottom (liquid) line up as the temperature goes up. Pretty much, you have no ethanol when your boiling temperature reaches 100 C (373 K in the graph). (And yeah this will also be higher depending on the amount of dissolved sugar, you could take your presumed specific gravity with no ethanol and throw this into an equation to calculate the actual boiling temp but it should only be a few degrees higher at most.)

Note also that you will boil off a considerable amount more water than you are boiling off ethanol, so the volume change itself would be very misleading. The stuff boiling off will be of the composition of the upper line for the corresponding temperature that you boil (draw a line to the right). I could set up a calculus equation to figure how much more, depending on your starting %alchol, but I'm not going to. (Unless you beg)

All this aside, to get all of the alcohol out of your beer you A) kill your yeast and B) lose presumable all/most hop flavor and aroma, so I would suggest not making an alcohol free IPA, but you could dry hop afterwards and keg.
 
Back
Top