Distilling to get non-alcoholic beer?

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Mountainsax

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I’m curious if anyone has used distillation techniques to get a non-alcoholic beer? Assuming you started with a regular beer recipe, would the leftover liquid in the still be a drinkable brew?

My wife and I are considering a move to stop drinking alcohol but I love beer and brewing. I’m looking for options to brew non-alcoholic beer that tastes good!

Cheers!
 
The alcohol distilling process is not legal in this Country.....period.
Bear this in mind as you go forward.
 
Heating your beer to the temperature that alcohol is vaporized (173.1F) is perfectly legal. If there is any mechanism or attempt to condense or collect that vapor, you are breaking federal law. When you make bread, alcohol is vaporized, as is anything else that involves yeast and cooking.

That being said, alcohol vapor is damn flammable. Heating a fluid containing alcohol is a potential disaster looking for a place to happen.

There are a few methods for making "near beer" (freeze and squeeze, etc, but those are illegal also) but let's be honest, none of them taste good. If you are having some morman's over for the holidays. Go buy a six pack of NA beer.
 
This topic is not strictly distilling (which would be against the rules of this forum). Heating the beer to 175 and holding for a period of time should drive off the ethanol. You could directly heat a keg if you had a 100% positive way to vent it, 2volume beer passes 50 psi at moderate temperatures, massive pressures at 175.

You will risk oxidation and flavor degradation if you take this approach.

http://blog.brewingwithbriess.com/c...onents-and-their-use-in-brewing-applications/

This is where I would start, there are several threads that consider this approach for a variety of reasons. You could also try boiling and carbonating a standard 1.015 wort and see how it tastes.


There are other options like Kombucha which are also fun to make and share, and are low or free from alcohol.
 
Pull a vacuum and vacuum remove (don't condense, then it's not distilling) the alcohol.

I don't have my chemical engineering books handy, but that may drop the temp to a more reasonable level. Sanke Kegs may be able to hold a vacuum. Not sure on Cornys.

The question is, what else has a BP/BT below water and will come out of solution?
 
At normal pressure, you won't be able to boil off all the alcohol. As long as there's some water left, there will be alcohol too. You can get rid of a lot of the alcohol, and maybe that's good enough, just don't fool yourself if you really need it to be alcohol-free.
I don't know what happens if you boil it under a vacuum.
 
There's a YouTube channel called NurdRage. He's a chemist who often does vacuum separation of aziotropes.

He may know how to do this, if possible.
 
At normal pressure, you won't be able to boil off all the alcohol. As long as there's some water left, there will be alcohol too. You can get rid of a lot of the alcohol, and maybe that's good enough, just don't fool yourself if you really need it to be alcohol-free.
I don't know what happens if you boil it under a vacuum.

This. Alcohol and water have something called an azeotropic relationship where they boil off at about the same rate after alcohol concentration is slightly reduced, so you cannot boil it all off without a very complex process.
 
Thanks for the feedback everyone! I am very aware that distilling alcohol is illegal. I’m not interested in collecting the alcohol, just gettin rid of it. This is mostly an academic investigation. I heard if a brewery, Wellbeing Brewing, thy is doing this (or something similar) and it got me interested...
 
Having done more reading, pressure swing distillation may work but normally is used to remove water from ethanol.
 
Thanks for the feedback everyone! I am very aware that distilling alcohol is illegal. I’m not interested in collecting the alcohol, just gettin rid of it. This is mostly an academic investigation. I heard if a brewery, Wellbeing Brewing, thy is doing this (or something similar) and it got me interested...

The hall monitors come out when you mention distill [emoji38]


I’m sure i read a byo or aha online article detailing how to drive off the ethanol if I remember or find it I’ll update
 
The alcohol distilling process is not legal in this Country.....period.
Bear this in mind as you go forward.

False... there are several ways to legally remove alcohol from beer, some even without 'distilling'... if you are going to throw down the hammer, make sure you have your facts straight!


If, as said by others, if you do not condense and collect the alcohol, you are 100% Legal. it is *not* distilling...

If you get a fuel alcohol permit, you are legally allowed to recover the alcohol out of your beer any damn way you like......

And finally, if you are a homebrewer that happens to have a Distilled Spirits Plant license and pay tax to the government on alcohol produces, you could collect the alcohol legally...
 
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The problem with this method is that you’d be hearing finished beer to 180 degrees or so. I suspect that’s somewhat unavoidable. Vacuum distillation might be a better way to remove alcohol with less damage to the beer’s flavor, but out of reach for most home brewers.
 
There was a basic brewing episode from January 9th about this. They liked the beer but he didn’t get all the alcohol out
 
The problem with this method is that you’d be hearing finished beer to 180 degrees or so. I suspect that’s somewhat unavoidable. Vacuum distillation might be a better way to remove alcohol with less damage to the beer’s flavor, but out of reach for most home brewers.

see post #12... machine to pull out at chilled temps for commercial use... in a laboratory rotary evaporator, they use a 60c(140f) bath to warm an alcohol containing liquid, the vapor temp is around 40c(104f) and they chill it in the vacuum back to 20c(60F) before removing the vacuum or pumping out... even if it got to the 140, that is what temp beer is pasteurized at, so probably won't ruin it..
 
I’m curious if anyone has used distillation techniques to get a non-alcoholic beer? Assuming you started with a regular beer recipe, would the leftover liquid in the still be a drinkable brew?

My wife and I are considering a move to stop drinking alcohol but I love beer and brewing. I’m looking for options to brew non-alcoholic beer that tastes good!

Cheers!

I cant imagine anything good coming out of heating finished beer to near boiling to drive off the alcohol. As for vacuum, i dont think you would have the money to afford such equipment, especually if you only want a bit of non-alcholic beer.

If you are going for negligible alcohol I think there are much better ways to do this. There are a small few of yeast species that have low enough attenuation that the result is negligible alcohol, or if you can afford to have 1%ish beer you can do that without fancy shmancy vacuums and yeast. All you need is be very inefficient during mashing. Also the grain bill will affect the result.

Once I did a half rye recipe that came out at around 1.3, and you could probably do lower easily. However for normal yeast and tolerable grain to water you can most likely only get down into <1 but more than .5 ABV, which is almost nothing, just still not legally "non-alcoholic".
 
Has anyone tried making a High Gravity wort, pitching the yeast and initiating fermentation then stopping fermentation 24 hours after pitching..... You could then dilute with water to taste..... Not sure if flavor would carry through but you could achieve a very low alcohol content with minimal effort.
 
There was a basic brewing episode from January 9th about this. They liked the beer but he didn’t get all the alcohol out

Good episode. Thanks!

Seems like the biggest issues are too much bitterness, loss of hops flavor/aroma, and oxidation. I think I’ll try doing most of my hopping during the second heating. I’ll flush the kettle with CO2 to prevent oxidation as much as possible. One nice thing about living at 7,400ft is that ethanol boils at closer to 162F, instead of 175F.

Going to try soon.
 
Good episode. Thanks!

Seems like the biggest issues are too much bitterness, loss of hops flavor/aroma, and oxidation. I think I’ll try doing most of my hopping during the second heating. I’ll flush the kettle with CO2 to prevent oxidation as much as possible. One nice thing about living at 7,400ft is that ethanol boils at closer to 162F, instead of 175F.

Going to try soon.

Let us know how it turns out! Seeing this and that other thread go active again made me want to give this a go as well. Planning to brew this weekend and will split the batch, and hopefully do a NA beer making process 3-4 weeks later.

A note on your temperature above. Since you have an ethanol-water mixture, it will boil at a point between the boiling point of ethanol and water. And if you are starting with a relatively low ABV this will be pretty close to the boiling point of water. If you start with a 6% beer I think at your altitude it will be around 197F. I'm not super confident in this calc, but don't be surprised if the temp keeps climbing past 162F initially. If you have a thermometer, it'd be good to use and note when the temp stabilizes. It will continue to climb (slowly) until you reach the boiling point of water at your elevation. That should be the point when mostly all the ethanol has been removed. Do it in a well ventilated space!

Good luck!
 
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