Techniques To Make Non-Alcoholic Beer

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funtourist

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I am on a quest to develop a system that is easy to use to make high quality non-aloholic beer from a beer brewed using traditional methods, ingredients, and yeast. The reason - I am no longer a college student wanting to consume copious amounts of alcohol. As I get older, I still love beer, but for health reasons, want to limit my alcohol consumption as much as possible. I feel being able to make NA beer will help others continue their brewing hobby even after they decide alcohol is not something they want to continue consuming.

I have narrowed the search down to 2 methods:
  • Vacuum Distillation
  • Reverse Osmosis

Regular Distillation/heating of beer is ruled out because it will not produce a quality end product. Also ruled out is small beer, using special yeast strains, etc.

I feel that vacuum distillation (without concentrating the vapors) would be ideal because it simply evaporates the alcohol and some water. Hop aroma would be lost but could easily be added back in. I don't know of any cons.
What equipment would be needed?A vacuum pump at what rating or Horsepower? How long do you have to run the pump and how much needs to be evaporated to remove the alcohol to a point where the beer is 0.5% or less?

Reverse Osmosis is supposed to be the 'best' technique, but reviews of na beers almost always mention a sour-ness. It's a known fact that reverse osmosis filtration of water at a ph of 7 will change it to an acidic ph of around 6. So, there are some issues with the sourness which would need to be remedied by adjusting PH.
Also, equipment specs are needed, such as exact types of filter membrane and molecular weight cutoff rating (seems to be 200-300)

Please post to this forum your real world experiences, equipment and process specifications. Please don't post just your opinions because this forum will get really off track.

The goal is to get some real solid scientific evidence of how to make NA beer at home with readily available and preferably inexpensive equipment.

Looking for people who have tried this technique to give some feedback on their experience.

Some information resources:
http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Flavored-malt-beverages/WO1996012788.html

http://www.tastybrew.com/forum/thread/166833

http://perrin.princeton.edu/12spring2012/482CHE482/na_beer.pdf
 
...high quality non-aloholic beer...

My only real world experience is that this is a contradiction in terms. It's not, I don't think, that the alcohol is an essential part of the flavor profile so much as it is that one doesn't seem to be able to remove the alcohol without also removing much of what makes beer beer (as you have observed with the hop aromatics).
 
...Regular Distillation/heating of beer is ruled out because it will not produce a quality end product....
...Please post to this forum your real world experiences, equipment and process specifications. Please don't post just your opinions because this forum will get really off track....
So you personally have tried heating beer between the boiling point of alcohol and water and have found it not suitable?
 
I am also interested in creating ultra low ABV brews. Something with all of the taste, body and flavors minus the alcohol. So I will follow this thread with great interest and hope you share you results from any experiments you perform. In the initial examination I think the Vacuum idea may be a workable solution followed by a round of force carbing in a keg after the attempt to remove the alcohol. I used to do a good bit of refrigeration and believe the temp/pressure differential will work to your advantage.

Wheelchair Bob

Prof,
I have tried the boil off experient and found the end result to be somewhat less pleasing than drinking stale, flat beer. Definately not an acceptable way of removing the alcohol since it cooks off the hops and alters the base malt taste very negatively...
 
...Prof,
I have tried the boil off experient and found the end result to be somewhat less pleasing than drinking stale, flat beer. Definately not an acceptable way of removing the alcohol since it cooks off the hops and alters the base malt taste very negatively...
Thanks for the info.

I have seen a few threads about non-alcoholic beer before and understood the theory of the "boil off" (not really boiling though). As I consider it with more experience I see three issues. Altering the hop profile, accounting for the boil off volume, and carbonating. Altering the hop profile would be pretty negligible in a beer that only had a bittering addition. At 60 minutes the bittering is already at 95+ percent and climbs very slowly towards 100% with a longer boil. I do all grain and a 90 minute boil is not uncommon for some brews. One might even do 2 hours or more if one wants some carmelization. Of course, my experience is with heating unfermented wort, and maybe the issue is with heating fermented beer???

Personally I'd consider krausening with a yeast addition for the 0.5ish ABV.

I'm wondering if it's possible to make a nice non alcoholic Hefe or Cream Ale for the summer.
 
What kind of vacuum pump are you considering? I did refrigeration and those relied on an oil seal and aren't made to remove that kind of liquid volume. The oil would probably get contaminated pretty quickly. I make some pretty low alcohol milds and Scottish ales.

Have you tried making a beer with a high percentage of specialty grain for flavor and low base malts mashed high? Remember alcohol does have a flavor.

Are there any commercial low alcohol beers you like?
 
Has anyone tried simply not adding yeast? It may be sweet but you could design a recipe to compensate.

Brew like normal, cool the wort, then carb.

May be worth a shot, certainly sounds easier than the methods you have been describing (no offense).
 
Has anyone tried simply not adding yeast? It may be sweet but you could design a recipe to compensate.

Bückler is made that way. Guess what it tastes like. Unfermented wort. Pretty disgusting IMO.

I would suggest OP buy and taste as many of the non/low alcohol beers as he can find. These use state of the art processes such as dialysis, vacuum distillation, fermentation with special yeast etc. and should, therefore, produce the 'best' results. I don't think he will be very pleased with any of them. What makes beer beer are not malt, hops alcohol and residual sugar but the host of volatiles that are responsible for the flavors. These are by and large fermentation byproducts. All the known methods that remove or suppress alcohol also have a profound effect on these. What you attempting to do is rather like trying to make vanilla ice cream without any vanilla.

Rather than trying to do the impossible I suggest that senior (and I am one) drinkers learn to practice moderation. If you can't do that you shouldn't be drinking at all. As any AA member will tell you trying to handle the problem with non alcoholic beer analogs only makes the problem worse.

It is quite possible to enjoy beer in moderation. I went to a gravity fed lager party yesterday, had a quarter of a mug of three or four of the beers and came home with my breathalyzer reading 0 ABV.

Another approach is to drink low alcohol session beers. The jewel in the crown of British brewing is lots of flavor with relatively low ABV.
 
Thanks for the suggestions.

Although drinking small beer, drinking in moderation, brewing beer without yeast or with a high level of non-fermentables are all options, they aren't solutions. Nothing is impossible. A recipe for success just hasn't been devised yet.

I am looking to merely add 1 more step in the brewing process. You brew the best beer possible, as you normally do, but then remove the alcohol in a way that will have a minimal impact on the beer.

Reverse osmosis with a membrane using a low molecular weight cutoff, can filter beer under high pressure and low temperature. You may have to add back in something to correct the flavor.

Most na beers aren't good because of the process of ultrafiltration strips the flavor from beer. Ultrafiltration is necessary to prevent clogging up the reverse osmosis membrane. I have read that major breweries are now using a special (inverted) funnel and vacuum distillation to distill off the aromatic compounds. The funnel increases the surface area of the liquid allowing the aromatics to be captured.

That's why I think vacuum distillation under ambient temps would be preferable, since you don't have to filter the beer.

Things that are worthwhile pursuits are often difficult, but that doesn't mean they are impossible. I am hoping we can get some real word testing results with equipment recommendations on this forum.
 
A friend of mine made a very nice NA stout by heating off the alcohol after fermentation, then priming and bottling. We did a side by side taste test and we actually preferred the smoothness of the NA version vs the extra little alcohol tang of the regular. The low hop, dark brews lend themselves to this extra heating step, and you could always dry hop afterwards if you want some aroma back.

We looked into a freeze method, like is used in reverse to concentrate alcohol in things like apple jack. The issue is that you can't really get rid of all of the alcohol this way.
 
This thread is relevant to my interests

I would suggest OP buy and taste as many of the non/low alcohol beers as he can find. These use state of the art processes such as dialysis, vacuum distillation, fermentation with special yeast etc. and should, therefore, produce the 'best' results. I don't think he will be very pleased with any of them.

I'd venture to guess you would not be pleased with much of the mass-produced beer you buy either! Taking a bad mass-market beer and making an NA version of it is kind of doomed from the start. Bud may be a technically excellent beer, but not one that I'd prefer to drink given the choice.

The volatiles and various other yeast byproducts that contribute to flavor, that's a fair point. You need to go for styles that don't rely on these

Hop characteristics, should in theory be pretty trivial to add back - hint, you are heating the fermented beer - nix the flavor/aroma additions in the boil and do a late addition in the evap stage instead..

This all sounds well and good, but still of course just armchair brewing. Planning to give it a few good attempts this summer though!

Anyone have any more experience with NA homebrews that came out well?

Cheers
-D :rockin:
 
Here's a crazy thought from a guy who has no interest in NA beer. I've got a barrel of mead going right now, and degas/sample it pretty much daily. It's in my basement, which is relatively temperature-stable (it's climbed maybe 8 degrees steadily in the past two month of springtime), but I've noticed that as it warms (granted, the fermentation has been progressing as well), it has had much more power to nearly knock me on my ass when I take a smell of it over the barrel, before and after stirring.
So, my suggestion for pulling off at least some the alcohol would be to try higher fermentation temps, if you can swing that without getting funky flavors, and to keep a light vacuum, by some means, on the headspace during fermentation (in wine theory, this should also keep your yeasts happier, but i haven't ventured into that realm yet). You may not get it as low alcohol as you want, but it seems like a starting point to me, if you're interested in the experiment. Agitation may also help, since ethanol vaporizes much easier than most other things in beer. I feel like the trick is to give the alcohol a place to go without oxidizing the beer. I'm reminded of some whiskey I drank one time, which had been capless for a couple weeks and lost all of the ethanol within, but still 'tasted' like the whiskey it originally was.
I hope it goes without saying to repitch and add sugar at bottling (or force carbonate).
Ok, cool! This is awesome I look forward to see what more everyone comes up with!
 
Great thread. I am a first time brewer looking for some solid information regarding NA home brewing. Currently looking at equipment and considering a jet pump to remove the alcohol. Sounds like the most effective and efficient process to create a tasty NA beer. From what I've read, forced carbonation may lead to an artificial taste like beer flavored soda. Anyone experiment with vacuum Distilling?
 
has anyone made any progress here?

I was in Heidelberg, Germany for two weeks for work. I spent nearly every evening in various bars in the Altstadt becasue, frankly, it beat sitting in a hotel room watching TV I couldn't understand. Every bar I went to had NA beer on the menu, and people actually ordered it. My colleague took me out to dinner once - we each had a 0.5L pils with dinner - after dinner I had a couple more as my hotel was walking distance. He kept pace by ordering NA beers - he had to drive home. Anyways, I thought it was an interesting observation on the German beer culture.

Anyways, it seems to me like there is a huge void in our American beer culture - we have major problems with drinking and driving, health concerns w/ alcohol, etc. I think that if a craft brewer could come up with a NA beer that was actually good, it could potentially sell, provided it was properly marketed.

My thoughts:

Brew an all-grain recipe heavy on malt flavor and color - something in the stout family, perhaps. after fermentation is complete, rack off of the yeast and heat at 175 dF. If you have a HERMS or RIMS system, you could accurately and consistently do this in the mash-tun. Chill, keg, and force carb. If you wanted something with hop flavor or aromatics, you could dry-hop or add the flavoring hop addition during the de-alcohol step. There would probably be some iterations required to get the bittering hops right as the lack of alcohol may mess with the perceived bitterness.

If one were clever, one could install a still to the top of their mash-tun to reclaim the boiled off ethanol for later use.
 
How about doing a lactobacillus-only fermentation of a Berliner Weisse or Gose wort? Most lacto produces a relatively small amount of alcohol, or none at all. See http://phdinbeer.com/2015/04/13/physiology-of-flavors-in-beer-lactobacillus-species/ for some info.

Another option could be brewing a high-dextrin beer using Carafoam or something similar, and then diluting it down until proper mouthfeel is achieved and alcohol level is sufficiently low. Use isomerized hop extract to bitter and dry hop to flavor.
 
I have brewed an NA beer. I made a 10g batch of a very low hopped brown ale. My wife was prego and wanted NA beer that wasnt a terrible lager. I brewed the beer as normal. Fermented as normal. The beer was about 5% abv. Once fermentation was done I racked off 5g into a keg. Racked 5g back into my kettle from the fermenter. Heated the beer up to 175-180f for 40 minutes. According to all of the information I read prior @ 174f for 30 minutes I would have boiled off 95% of all alcohol. I then put the beer back into the keg and carbonated both beers.

Because both beers were very low hopped there wasn't much of flavor difference. You could tell the difference for sure but very similar. My wife would enjoy a couple NA beers. Now I didnt have a way to test the abv of the NA beer but I trusted in the science.

I do know that I burned off alcohol though. I kept smelling the beer as I was boiling off and got extremely drunk off the fumes. I also had the weirdest hangover ever the next day. It was terrible.

If I was planning on doing this more than the one time I would have sent a sample off to test the actual ABV.

I would say that if you want to make NA beer this is a method that produces very good beer if you should stick to highly malted beers with low hops.
 
Heated the beer up to 175-180f for 40 minutes. According to all of the information I read prior @ 174f for 30 minutes I would have boiled off 95% of all alcohol.

Time isn't the thing to watch, but temperature is. The solution will rise to the boiling point of ethanol, plateau, and stay there until most of the ethanol has boiled off, and then the temperature will start to rise again. At this point you've removed as much as you can remove, which is not all because water and ethanol form an azeotropic mixture.

(For those further interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope
 
I think you are a little confused on the mechanism involved here. If you heat a 6% ABV mixture of water and ethanol (and assume that a 6% beer would behave about the same) you will find that the temperature rises uniformly, without pausing, to 95 °C at which point ebullition commences. If the solution is 12% ABV it boils at 91.35 °C etc. (all at sea level on a normal barometer day). This is the basis for the simple determination of the strengths of dry wines by 'ebulliometry'*. The temperature of boiling water is measured with an expanded scale thermometer and then the temperature of boiling wine. The difference goes into a little circular slide rule (from which I got the numbers above).

Even though you do not reach boiling alcohol will be removed faster than water as the vapor over a binary mixture is richer in the more volatile substance (alcohol) than the less (water). The reason you wont get all the alcohol is that the enrichment becomes less and less as the concentration of ethanol approaches 0.

The fact that ethanol/water mixtures deviate from Raoult's law doesn't really come into it here as with beer we are well below the azeotropic point. The lowest temperature at which a mixture of ethanol and water can boil is when the mixture is approximately 190 proof (95% ABV) and that temperature is only 0.2 °C less than the boiling point of pure EtOH. As beer is much less alcoholic than that the azeotrope is not of interest to us here.
 
I made a clone of Dry Dock's Vanilla Porter for my brother who is alcohol free, by cooking off the ethanol. OG was 1.045 and FG was 1.016.

I reduced the hop addition times by half, eg. 60 min hops went in at 30min. You need to account for the additional time spent above isomerization temps. I mashed at 158 for 60 min, fermented for 2 weeks and conditioned in a keg for another week.

It is best to cold crash the yeast out before cooking off the alcohol, as too much yeast in suspension leads to bad off flavors after cooking. I crashed for 4 days and transferred to my boil kettle. I maintained 175F for 45min. From what I understand, I could only get down to 0.5% ABC without a vacuum, but that is fine.

After cooking the ethanol off and chilling the batch, I added (alcohol free) chocolate and vanilla extract in tiny amounts until the flavor was Where I wanted it. Then I added 1 campden tab/ gallon for stabilization since all the alcohol is gone. After keg and carb, and some additional resting time, I bottled and it is delicious.

I have to have 4-5 of these to feel anything, but there is still alcohol in the batch. The flavor and body make it a delicious beer though.
 
Did you? If so, how was it?

I did not. As I didn't have to drive anywhere, I wasn't into low-test.

I wish I did a couple of nights... I think some of those German Pils are stronger than what I expect out of a typical American pils, and so I woke up with a slight headache a couple of nights.

my German collegue commented that one of the NA beers had a nice malty taste, FWIW.
 
I was thinking about this topic for a while now, and i really believe that vacum is the best solution for homebrewers. I m a plumber, and i m thinking to vacum pump we use in refrigeration. Alcohol evaporation temperature should be around 35 celsius degrees, so why don t keep the pump going with a timer, 1 hour run and one hour stop, for one day while the beer is in fermentation chamber, connecting to the bubbler hole? It may work in my opinion. And putting a basic airfilter inline maybe stupid will stop most of the oils before they reached the pump.
Or maybe it is just a bad idea.
Sorry for my english, i m italian.
Cheers!
 
I think the problem most people who have tried vacuum techniques have run into is uncontrollable foam. Obviously your are going to suck all the CO2 out of the beer as well as all the other volatiles (which will have a negative effect on the flavors as well) but apparently the foam goes wild.

When you use your vacuum pump for work you are using it to extract the air that you let into your system when you opened it as well as the wee bit of water that entered with that air. Think what will happen when you try to evacuate a container full of beer with it. Orders of magnitude more water will be drawn through the pump than would be the case when it is used for what it was designed for. So if you do do thus be sure to have some sort of barrier to keep foam from getting into your pump and be sure to change the oil after every use.

A vacuum pump is overkill. A Bernoulli device connected to a water hose should pull you enough vacuum for this purpose. You won't have to change oil and any foam that goes up the suction line just goes out the waste port. You still don't want foam sucked out because it contains beer and especially the proteins needed for head formation but some foam in a Bernoulli device is much better than foam in you refrig vacuum pump.

Read a few posts here. You will see that your English is better than a lot of the native speakers who have posted.
 
I have a silly question: Is there any risk of an explosion when boiling off the alcohol in an oven? Just wondering. It seems like the fumes would build up inside the oven.
 
I have a silly question: Is there any risk of an explosion when boiling off the alcohol in an oven? Just wondering. It seems like the fumes would build up inside the oven.

Well, I think there is a chance. Alcohol fumes are flammable, and the oven used to be hot so... Perhaps it is a chance to read about it in future in the Do.not. post on this site... :mug:
 
I have a silly question: Is there any risk of an explosion when boiling off the alcohol in an oven? Just wondering. It seems like the fumes would build up inside the oven.

5 gallons of 5% beer contains about a quart of very flammable stuff. Do it outdoors. Use an electric element for heating if possible. Or at least put a fan blowing toward the top of the kettle. If my memory still works, you are shooting for 178.5 degrees. You could use a hydrometer to determine when your NA has been achieved.
 
After reading some information from a non-alcoholic brewery - I believe it was Surreal Brewing - about how they made their beverages by following traditional brewing techniques to achieve 0.5% ABV, I decided to try something similar. The basic process is that I always use wheat malt as my base for body, I target an OG of 1.010 to 1.015 to restrict ABV, and I mash hot (165F for 60 minutes) to lower attenuation. Outside of that, I follow typical brewing processes.

Based on the batches I have made so far, trends I've noticed are:
  • My efficiency takes about a 10% hit compared to my standard beer brewing (75% vs 85%)
  • I use about 2 lb of grain in a 5 gallon batch to hit my target OG
  • Attenuation stays in the 40-45% range across various yeasts
  • Sulfur is prominent for the first 2 weeks of bottle conditioning but dissipates by the end of the third week
  • For hoppy styles, 25 IBUs is pleasant while anything above 30 IBUs becomes harsh
  • Also for hoppy styles, flameout and dry hop amounts of 4+ oz each in 5 gallons is needed to achieve noticeable hop aroma and flavor
My next steps are to continue working on achieving more hop aroma and flavor in hop forward beers and then to start work on darker styles. To date, I have only made lagers and pale ales. While I wouldn't say that what I have brewed using this process has completely met my expectations, my latest iterations are very enjoyable to drink and certainly taste like beer.
 
After reading some information from a non-alcoholic brewery - I believe it was Surreal Brewing - about how they made their beverages by following traditional brewing techniques to achieve 0.5% ABV, I decided to try something similar. The basic process is that I always use wheat malt as my base for body, I target an OG of 1.010 to 1.015 to restrict ABV, and I mash hot (165F for 60 minutes) to lower attenuation. Outside of that, I follow typical brewing processes.

Based on the batches I have made so far, trends I've noticed are:
  • My efficiency takes about a 10% hit compared to my standard beer brewing (75% vs 85%)
  • I use about 2 lb of grain in a 5 gallon batch to hit my target OG
  • Attenuation stays in the 40-45% range across various yeasts
  • Sulfur is prominent for the first 2 weeks of bottle conditioning but dissipates by the end of the third week
  • For hoppy styles, 25 IBUs is pleasant while anything above 30 IBUs becomes harsh
  • Also for hoppy styles, flameout and dry hop amounts of 4+ oz each in 5 gallons is needed to achieve noticeable hop aroma and flavor
My next steps are to continue working on achieving more hop aroma and flavor in hop forward beers and then to start work on darker styles. To date, I have only made lagers and pale ales. While I wouldn't say that what I have brewed using this process has completely met my expectations, my latest iterations are very enjoyable to drink and certainly taste like beer.

Considering taking a stab at this--have you had any more realizations the more you've been testing these methods? It seems remarkably simple...
 
After reading some information from a non-alcoholic brewery - I believe it was Surreal Brewing - about how they made their beverages by following traditional brewing techniques to achieve 0.5% ABV, I decided to try something similar. The basic process is that I always use wheat malt as my base for body, I target an OG of 1.010 to 1.015 to restrict ABV, and I mash hot (165F for 60 minutes) to lower attenuation. Outside of that, I follow typical brewing processes.

Based on the batches I have made so far, trends I've noticed are:
  • My efficiency takes about a 10% hit compared to my standard beer brewing (75% vs 85%)
  • I use about 2 lb of grain in a 5 gallon batch to hit my target OG
  • Attenuation stays in the 40-45% range across various yeasts
  • Sulfur is prominent for the first 2 weeks of bottle conditioning but dissipates by the end of the third week
  • For hoppy styles, 25 IBUs is pleasant while anything above 30 IBUs becomes harsh
  • Also for hoppy styles, flameout and dry hop amounts of 4+ oz each in 5 gallons is needed to achieve noticeable hop aroma and flavor
My next steps are to continue working on achieving more hop aroma and flavor in hop forward beers and then to start work on darker styles. To date, I have only made lagers and pale ales. While I wouldn't say that what I have brewed using this process has completely met my expectations, my latest iterations are very enjoyable to drink and certainly taste like beer.
You could try the above with REALLY hot mashing at 185F and using Windsor or London yeast. Techniques To Make Non-Alcoholic Beer

It does work and might be really good in conjunction with your technique.
 
What about this process for NA?

- mash beer as you normally would
- sparge as you normally would
- boil for 5 minutes, with enough hop material to help keep things anti-microbial
- Ferment (almost non-hopped) wort
- After fermentation, cold crash wort to filter out suspended proteins (and if you can filter?)
- Transfer to kettle, and proceed to bring to boil, finish brew day as normal
- Boiling during this time should offgas (wrong word, I know) the alcohol during the 60m boil
- Cool wort and transfer to keg
- Cool to carb temps, then carb and serve

Its basically changing around the brewing process to utilize boiling to drive off the alcohol generated by the fermentation. Much of the profiles of the beer should exist and you can still dry hop if you want to (just no biotransformation)
 
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