sportscrazed2
Well-Known Member
I for one love beer but I don't particularly care for the effects of alcohol. anyone ever try to make a sub 1% session beer that still has flavor? and if i may ask how did you do it?
Well, you could get a regular beer recipe, reduce the base grain down to what'd give you 1% (keep the specialty grains the same) and then adjust with maltodextrin and malt extract when it's done to make it taste right.
Basically, during fermentation the yeast are turning the simple sugars (most of which come from the base malt) into alcohol and co2. The base grains also contribute complex sugars which give beer body and that "malt backbone" you hear about. Reducing the base malt reduces simple sugar, thus lowering alcohol, but you'll need to compensate for the reduced complex sugars and residual simple sugars by adding maltodextrin and malt extract after fermentation.
Well, there's always malta, a soft drink popular in Latin-American/Hispanic/Carribean communities, brewed with beer ingredients (caramel malt, tiny bits of hops, and water, but apparently without yeast, hence no alcohol or way under 1%) and some corn syrup.
mash at 165
Pretty sure it was BierMuncher that had success a couple years back at making an n/a beer. Basically made himself a good session beer and boiled off the alcohol. Might go looking for that thread.
EDIT: Here.
I'd think that if you don't ferment or you drive off the alcohol then you are going to need to pasteurize the product somehow.
I think you have few options to brew a low alcohol beer
1) start with a low OG and some good amount of unfermentable sugars, so the yeast doesn't have much to convert to alcohol. You will get a thin and watery beer.
2) start with higher OG and with a huge amount of unfermentable sugars. That will end with a very sweet beer.
3) start with normal OG, let it ferment at low temp for a while to get the alcohol you want, then pasteurize the beer.
I tried process #2 for a malzbier and it worked fine.
If you boil off the alcohol, there shouldn't be any issues. The readily fermentable sugars would have already been fermented, there would still be some dextrins that Brett could ferment but no more than with any other beer.
It's not the alcohol that keeps the beer from getting infected, it's good sanitation practices. If you're going to get a Brett infection, it's as likely to happen in a 6%-ABV "regular" beer as it is in a 1% beer that's been neutered.
The other "beers" that are basically non-fermented; I'd think you'd just have to be especially careful about sanitation, as you'd have a lot of simple sugars kicking around for any wild yeast.
so you boil it and the alcohol separates from the beer and you have to drain it off somehow?
There's an all-grain recipe for it here, but the guy's not forthcoming with replies via email, sadly:
http://askthebeerguy.com/beer-recipes/malta-non-alcoholic-malt-beverage-caribbean-and-latin-america
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