Hoegaarden 0.0 alcohol free beer?

[WhiskeyR]

Let me say that I don't have a problem NA's. I do have a porblem with: A. naming one Hoegaarden and B. making it even after your own employees hate it.

Read the article. InBev's employees don't hate it. The author of the article ("Your corespondent") and one of his "male colleagues" hate it.

 

[Revvy]

This is the part that seems the most problematic to me. It's not just that you'll miss the warming effect of alcohol in a n/a version of a big beer. There's more to it, and you'll miss it even in a small beer. But it's hard to describe alcohol's impact on flavor, maybe because it's always there. If removing the alcohol can be done without otherwise impacting flavor, it would be interesting to do some side-by-side comparisons.

Anyone have a better handle on how alcohol interacts with the other flavors in beer? Does it accentuate particular flavors, or aromas even? Isn't the flavor of the alcohol itself a little bit sweet?

Honestly having drunk Na beers for the last 10 weeks or so, if your N/a beer tastes great then you don't notice whether or not it has an alcohol burn. Clausthauler dark is a good example, it tastes a lot like a couple of my favorite vienna lagers, like Schell Firebrick.

If we make something flavor full, with decent body, and in those styles that need it, good hop or spice aroma. I tiny tongue bite isn't going to be missed.

 

[charlie17]

In France some years ago I found a dark n/a beer called "Tortel Brune". It was amazingly much better than any n/a beer I've ever had in the US. Basically the n/a beers in the us are made from brews that didn't have anything going for them to begin with other than alcohol, so without the alcohol there's not any point, but if you take something that starts with a decent flavor, you don't lose nearly as much when you remove the alcohol. I found it delightful to be able to enjoy something like a decent (if not great) dark beer at times when I wanted to stay clear-headed.

My attempt to approximate it at home has been simply to mix some dark LME into seltzer water. The result actually tastes pretty good, in that it captures some of what is good about dark beer, even though nobody would mistake it for beer. But if a good n/a porter, stout, dunkel or schwarzbier were available I'd buy a case in a heartbeat.

 

[Rich71093]

I love beer, but I don't like the affects of alcohol. My first two brews were selected partly for the low gravity. If I could brew n/a beer that tasted good I would do it. After I get more experience I might try it. I would buy good tasting n/a beer, but all the ones I have tried don't taste very good.