Low-ABV beer?

[tll77]

alcohol boils at 170°F, but does it also boil off at that temperature when the alcohol is combined with water

No, it does not. It depends on alcohol concentration and rises as the %alcohol drops.
Use the chart in this link to find an approximate temp vs alcohol%(the purple curve is the one you want)

https://homedistiller.org/theory/theory/strong

 

[NGD]

That dry ice video was pretty ballsy. I know a guy (who has a similar appearance to me) put a 1/2in cube of dry ice in a liter PET bottle with 1in water. The resulting explosion was powerful. Louder than a shotgun. Took a fair chunk of earth.

Had that person been holding onto the bottle I...I mean he would likely be typing with one hand. Calculate carefully and I’d highly recommend against using glass.
Plus I’ve found that bottle fermented beers seem to have more character after 2-3 weeks.

 

[RPh_Guy]

I’m not convinced that with good sanitation practices you need the hops. Look at starters.

Lacto is ubiquitous. Beer is highly likely to sour without hops, over time. That is why we use hops.
If a starter is sour, then blending it into a much larger batch will reduce the sourness below tasting threshold. The same can't be said if the entire batch sours.

 

[Toxxyc]

Thanks for all the info guys! I'm definitely going to add SOME hops to the brew. Might as well give it something to work with then it comes to the pre-boil phase so that I can at least taste something other than just plain malt.

Anyway, I found two places here in South Africa recommended by some other brewers I'm going to contact to find out costing on laboratory testing of my brews. Here's to hoping it won't break the bank. If the ABV is low enough I'll strongly considering making a ton of this beer to drink at parties and other get-togethers when I plan to drive.

I'm REALLY looking forward to this, not only because of the low ABV but also because it'll probably be my first-ever AG/BIAB brew!

 

[Miraculix]

I’m not convinced that with good sanitation practices you need the hops. Look at starters. I think starters TASTE sour but think it’s a perception thing because I am accustomed to hopped beer. The resulting beer always tastes fine (and some of it has been entered into competitions and done quite well) so I do not think it was contaminated despite a perception of sourness. I think it is worth a try on the unhopped “beer”. Very interested in hearing how it all works out and may try to brew an N/A beer myself.

I tried it multiple times mate, believe me, you need hops.

 

[jmarkkaufman]

Sounds good.

Regarding the low ABV beer I look forward to hearing how it turns out ‘

 

[Toxxyc]

I got my grains and hops a short while ago. Festive season meant things went slower than planned. Going to brew soon-ish!

 

[505-Brewer]

You want to have at least 15 to 20 ibus when fermenting, otherwise your beer will most likely turn sour. Hops inhibit bacteria growth which will happen otherwise.
But you could reduce your post fermentation boil to only late additions, that would probably work!

If you are relying on hops to prevent bacteria from spoiling your batch you are doing it wrong. Yes hops are antibacterial but thinking you absolutely need hops to produce a clean beer is not factual. Good yeast pitch and sanitation is a better practice.

 

[Miraculix]

If you are relying on hops to prevent bacteria from spoiling your batch you are doing it wrong. Yes hops are antibacterial but thinking you absolutely need hops to produce a clean beer is not factual. Good yeast pitch and sanitation is a better practice.

I am not relying on it, I say hops take care of the little amount of unwanted guests that you don't get with good sanitation and yeast pitch rate.

Those guests will multiply and sour your beer. If not instantly, then with time in the bottle.

Tried this several times. Unless you brew under lab conditions, no chance without hops. I tried this more than five times, know a lot of people who did as well, everybody ended up with something sour. Sometimes nicely sour though.

 

[Toxxyc]

Alright, so the long and the short:

I have a 1.1kg grain bill. I'm going to mash at higher temps to get less fermentables. From my quick calculations and using online guides and sources, I suspect I'll end up at around 0.25% ABV. To me that's low enough to not boil it AT ALL after the ferment, so I'm going to push for a slightly higher IBU in the initial boil.

On the hop profile, I'm planning it really simple. Admiral in the boil for bittering. It's a good bittering hop, giving notes of resinous citrus like orange along with some spices. It's a hop made for IPAs and APAs, so I think it's a great basis to start off from in terms of the bittering. For flavour and aroma I'm going to go for that experimental U1/108 hops I have in the fridge as well. It has a sweeter profile, with tropical fruits like lichi, guava or mango and also has a lemongrass and citrus note to it. I think these two will work together very well (in my head they do). I'll also dry hop with the U1/108 before bottling, so I can be sure that aroma is all there. Maybe even dry hop in the mini keg. Would be aweseome.

On the fermentation - it'll be pitched directly on the yeast cake from my previous brew - Mangrove Jack's M42 New World Strong Ale that was used to ferment the IPA bitter I'm bottling this weekend, so it's kinda perfect. The yeast has a high attentuation, so I hope it doesn't eat too much of the sugars, but it left the IPA bitter at 1.012 so here's to hoping. It has a neutral aroma profile, so you'll taste whatever malts I toss in there and it won't change the perception of the hops. I'll ferment at the normal 20°C I do all my brews, which is easy to maintain with my cooler-box-and-ice-packs-under-a-towel-method.

Anyway, yeah so that's it. Any thoughts/ideas I can do or change on this brew?

 

[MaaZeus]

No need to boil alcohol away or anything, just make a light wort and bottle it as it is. Ok, I am just joking but actually there is a story behind this. I am convinced this is something some non-alcoholic beer manufacturers are doing. Because last summer I bought a big box of cheap NA beer from Lidl. It was a hot summer so you can guess how good a light lager tastes but I figured drinking real beer day in and out would be unhealthy so I went non-alcoholic.

The moment I opened the can and gave it a taste I immidietly got a sense of dejavu that it tastes familiar. Then I figured "holy hell this tastes exactly like wort! " On the spot I grabbed my hydrometer and measured it. I dont remember the exact numbers but it was something like 1.030. The mad scientist in me activated and I opened another can, poured it in a clean soda bottle, gave it a few careful shakes to get rid of CO2 and pitched a bread yeast in and put on the classic balloon airlock and what do you know, it actually fermented down to 1.012 or such. It tasted like crap because of bread yeast and 30C room temperature in summer but it was still beer. Clever bastards, selling us unfermented wort meant for ~2.8% beers with a mark up and less waiting time. I did take a before fermentation and during fermentation photos as a proof and we did get a good laugh out of it with my friends.

Anyway, I appreciate what you guys are doing here, figuring out how to make a good NA beer. For Science!!!

 

[Toxxyc]

Alright, so this weekend was "the time". Saturday, to be precise. Our wonderful, 36°C Saturday.

I started out the morning with some friends over to finish off some beers I had so I could use the bottles. Why? Well, because I needed bottles. Because the previous beer (Munton's IPA Bitter) was still in the fermenter, for a respectable while at this stage. Want to see how that one turned out (so far)? Check here. Anyway, we finished off a few bottles and a mini keg during a "beer breakfast". You can have champagne during breakfast, so why not beer?

Anyway.

Now they're gone, and I get to work. I borrowed a big-ass urn from a forum member (@Langchop) to see how this AG/BIAB thing will go. Great oke, so big props and a sincere thanks to him!

Back to brewing! I put a bunch of water in the urn. 15l, it looks like. Respectable amount. I'm aiming for a strike water temp of around 71°C so I turn the urn's thermostat to JUSt under 70°C. I leave it for about 45 minutes, look up to see it's on "keep warm", so it hit temperature. Take my probe thermometer, dump it in the water. 88°C. Aww yay.

Overshot the temp by far. So I take off the lid off the urn, turn it off and wait. For almost an hour. During this time I get started on bottling the beer currently occupying my fermenter. Sanitize the bottles, wash out the mini keg, etc. Halfway into bottling I check on the temps and they're at 69°C. Close. Turn up the thermostat a little bit, set the probe thermometer in the urn and set the alert alarm for when it hit 70°C, which it does in a matter of seconds. Turn the thermostat so that it's at the current temp and hold it there.

Next step - sink the brew bag. It's a lekker big bag so it goes over the entire rim with ease. It's deep, so it goes lekker deep into the water. Probe of the thermometer is still in the kettle, just above the element on the protective grid. I reckon it's a good spot to check for temps, since the wort above will be slightly cooler. So I set the thermometer to 72° so it'll warn me when temps go a tad high, I added the grains and stirred. Water temperature dipped to 69°C again, but I turned up the heat to get it to 70°C again. Set the timer for an hour, and continued on the bottling. I stirred twice during the time of the mash as well, just FYI, and the temps stuck at 70°C for the duration.

Right, so mash is done. I lift up the bag and the first thing I see is...holy crap it's heavy! 1kg of grains take up A LOT of water! Anyway, I lift up the bag and now I realize how frigging dark the wort is. I completely overshot the colour I was aiming for, but more on that later. So I squeeze the bag a bit, burn my hands like mad, and realize this ain't gonna work. I need to find something to place this bag in. Bag in hand I kinda hobble over to the cabinet where the pots are, and wort is dripping all over the kitchen floor. Seriously glad wife's not seeing this. Get a pot, dump the bag and now I'm taking a look at this situation.

Got a pot with a hella hot bag in it, and I don't know how to get the water out. I know about sparging, so I turn on the kettle. Halfway into pouring the hot water over the grains I realize I'm just making my problem worse - I'm going to burn even more. So I stop. Squeeze the bag as much as I could and pour that wort into the urn. I then sparge with cold water, because it needs to cool down. At that cooler temp I manage to get the grains pretty dry by squeezing the bag and add that wort to the urn.

Great. I'm at about 14l in the urn remaining, so not a lot of loss. Now for the boil. Probe thermometer is back into the urn and I turn up the heat. A lot. Set the probe to 98°C because we mos boil cooler than at the coast.

Yeah no.

Thing screams like mad a 98°C but no boiling. So I turn it to 100°C. Same story. The wort only starts to boil when the temperature hit 102°C.

No worries. I add my 60-minute hop addition. I'm not entirely sure what the weights were (I wrote it down at home, so I'll have to check), but I think it was 10g Admiral and 6g U1/108. I decided on this combo as the Admiral has good bittering qualities and the U1/108 apparently has good tropical flavours when it's boiled for a long time. So I boil them for a long time. Set a timer for 45 minutes and wait.

At 45 minutes I add my 15-minute hop addition. I add more U1/108 for flavour, and I think here I added 8g. Could be 6g, but I'm not sure. Anyway. It's boiling.

After 15 minutes I turn off the kettle, and then my issue hit. Now I need to cool this **** down. I read all kinds of bad things about wort that stays too hot for too long, so I'm worrying now. With the urn turned off I'm expecting the temperature to drop slowly, but it doesn't. Langchop took this double-wall urn and insulated the gap between the walls, meaning this thing keeps heat. It keep heat WELL.

Plan B. I kinda expected this, so during the previous week I've been running and ice machine to make some ice for me should I need it. Clean water, no worries.

Well I need it. I start adding ice. And more ice. And more ice. And more. Suddenly I'm out of ice. Thermometer still reads 64°C. So what now? OK, cold water from the fridge (also clean, don't worry). Doesn't do much. 63°C.

I'm out of ice and out of cold water, so I do the only thing I can do - let it sit and cool down on it's own, while I hope and pray there's no trouble with the wort. I start a fan and let it blow on the urn as well. No difference.

Now at this stage I need to point out that my plan was to pour cooled wort directly onto the yeast cake in my fermenter. Obviously this isn't going to work, so I go to work on the yeast cake. I swirl it up and pour it out into two clean glass bottles. I lid them and set them aside to separate. I need to harvest the yeast and get rid of as much of the previously fermented beer, no?

So I just rinse out the fermenter to get rid of the old krausen ring and decide to pitch the still warm wort into the fermenter. I do so. It's a mess, it splashes everywhere out of the tap of the urn. Eh. I'll clean up later. During this time I remember I have some lactose in the pantry and figure I'll just toss it in there as well. What's there to lose? I weigh it out - 140g - and add.

With the wort into the fermenter and see I'm 6l short to my aimed volume. Add clean, cold water. Temperature in low 50's now. Still waaaay to hot to pitch yeast. I place the fermenter in my cooler box and pack it with ice packs. Cold, wet towel draped over the top to aid cooling. It's not working lekker. After an hour the stick-on thermometer still glows on the 40°C mark. I'm out of ice, I'm out of ice packs and I got nothing left. I stick a bottle of frozen milk in there. Slooooowly the temperature starts to come down.

By now it's bedtime. It's 22:00 and the wort is still warm. The stick-on thermometer reads 32°C. The yeast has been washed and it's clean. I just have no other choice, it's bedtime and I can't let the wort sit like this. The fermenter has not been sanitized and something WILL happen. So I pitch the yeast. The entire cake. I had the yeast at room temp, at least, and the outside temperature of 36°C means the yeast is at least close to the wort temperature. Not ideal, but eh. Can't keep worrying over this. I sink the airlock, wet the towel again, add the last bit of ice that the ice machine has been making during this time on top of the towel so it can trickle cold water down the side of the fermenter and go to bed.

At around 2:30 I wake up. I get up to check on the wort, because I'm worried. Torch in hand I turn off the alarm, unlock the security gate and head to the kitchen. Whole house smells like chocolate wort. I'm happy, wife not so much. Anyway, get to the fermenter and check the temps. YES! It's coming down, the milk bottle is working, along with the ice. It's at 24° and coming down. Not too bad. Luckily the M42 yeast is a very clean yeast, so I can only hope it didn't stress too much.

Anyway, Sunday morning I took a look again and found the fermenter at 20°C. That's my target temp, so I'm happy. I keep adding ice and ice packs to keep it there, check through the lid and see some foaming on top. Only a little bit, but there's activity - YAY.

During the course of Sunday I leave it alone, and last night I took a look inside. There's a krausen ring. Not big, not thick, at all, but that's to be expected. There's a definite CO2 smell, but nothing else. No off smells yet, which is GREAT. Close it up and let it sit.

This morning I checked on it. The smell from the fermenter is great. There's CO2, but there's also sweet chocolate notes and some great hop aromas coming off. I took a tiny little taste test and, to be honest, I think it's OK. I expected a much more watery brew, but it actually had pretty good aroma and flavour. Body is a bit on the down-low, but that's to be expected. It has a sweet-ish caramel-chocolate taste, and it reminds me of a stout. Wasn't what I was aiming for, but it did give me some good ideas.

 

[Toxxyc]

Now, some notes.

I overshot the colour with the roasted malts. I wanted to add some roasted malts to give the beer a deeper colour and not just look like diluted pee. Turns out 30% of the grain bill was a bit too much, maybe. On that note, I'm glad I did, since the caramel chocolate flavours with the added sweetness of the lactose is actually not bad.

I love BIAB/AG brewing. I immediately saw what I could change, what I should change and how I can tweak recipes with this. It's opened up a whole new world for me, to be honest, and I'm seriously happy I tried this. Suddenly my death-by-chocolate sweet stout I've been meaning to try is now a reality, since I don't have to guess what the kits will turn out like. I can tweak my recipe to my liking! I can do hop additions as I please and tune the flavour and aroma to my heart's content. It's fantastic!

Oh yes, and on the gravity. I aimed for 1.012 according to the online calculators. I hit 1.011. That's pretty close to my target gravity, even if I have to say so myself!

Finally, spent grains. I dumped it all into a pot and figured I'll dry it and make dog biscuits out of it. However, it had already gone sour by Saturday evening. This heat definitely didn't do it any good, so I dumped it in the garden. How should one go about drying it if you want to use it for something other than compost?

 

[Toxxyc]

And finally, some pictures! Adding the grains:

After the mash and checking on the colour:

Gravity before pitching the yeast:

Next morning - some activity!

And it's fermenting with a tiny krausen ring!

 

[Toxxyc]

And I think the fermentation is complete. I'll be taking gravity readings this afternoon and again over the next few days to confirm, but I do believe it's done. CO2 pressure is gone and the krausen is dropping. I guess it's time to dry hop, then cold crash and then bottle. Yay!

 

[Toxxyc]

Works, meet Spanner.

Our cleaning lady has the tendency to move and rearrange everything in the house when she cleans. Great work ethic and I really do appreciate it, but unfortunately for the second time, this included my fermenter, where I had it tucked into a corner and covered with a towel. Now once before she managed to knock out the airlock and leave the brew open to air for how long, and I had to bottle immediately after that. This Friday, it seems the same happened, but even more. I think she opened the fermenter to see what's inside. When I got home on Friday evening, the airlock was loose, the lid only loose-fitted on the fermenter and the towel was removed and neatly folded next to the fermenter.

And the fermenter stood in direct sunlight. Crap. I immediately tried to cool it down, but the temperature had already spiked to 24°C since it was no longer cooled in the cooler, and I was worried about the sunlight on the fermenter. Only a bit, but still. Also tightened the lid.

So I left it for a bit, because "more time is better". On Sunday I took a peak through the lid, and yes, there were small, fluffy white spots floating in the beer. ****. I opened the lid to make sure, and yes, tiny white spots where floating in the brew. Not many, maybe 5 or 6 of them, about 4mm in diameter. Since I had no idea what to do, I decided to bottle ASAP.

I pulled a sample tube of beer to check gravity, mixed the gelatin to fine, got the priming sugar ready and went to work. Took a paper towel and scooped out the moldy spots as best as I could, added gelatin and gave it a slight stir so it would mix in a bit. Sediment remained relatively solid. Sanitized my bottles and the one mini keg I managed to get my hands on since. Checked the (now room-temperature) hydrometer sample and it stood at 1.009 still. Since Tuesday it hasn't moved. I assume it's relatively close to done, but since I didn't want to risk bottle bombs, I decided to carbonate very lightly. 60g of dextrose monohydrate on about 19l of beer, dissolved in some boiling water. Pitched, mixed and left to stand for a while. Beer was ice cold at this stage (around 8°C).

I bottled the lot, and also tasted the sample from the hydrometer. It still tastes fine, so I'm hoping it'll not be too ****. Luckily it seems like the hops haven't "skunked".

I guess it's impossible to tell what the issue with the brew will be until it comes to the taste test, correct? Quite bummed by this, to be honest.

 

[Toxxyc]

Alright, so this is a very young brew, but I did open one to test over the weekend. It spent a week in the bottle, which I know isn't enough, but I was curious.

Anyway, so far, I don't like it. It's basically a hop explosion and the little bit I get from the grain bill is the roasted malts. Coupled with the hop bitterness the little bit you get is actually anise/liquorice. I tasted the same beer a few times, and I'm sure that's the primary flavour I get. It's very possible that this is because of the higher temperature I had to pitch the yeast in, so I can attribute the flavour to something at least.

Mouthfeel is as expected. Watery, light, not much there. I'm hoping this will slightly increase as the carbonation picks up.

Aroma is hoppy and still a bit chocolatey. There's fruit in there, which is expected from the experimental U1/108 hops I used. It's not bad.

Taste is quite bitter. I used Admiral as primary bittering hop and I underestimated it's capability. It's one hella hop. It bitters quite a lot, and I'm hoping that at least the aroma and even flavour will die down a bit with age, because coupled with this bitterness it's maybe a tad too much. I like hops as much as the next hophead but I realized that yes, there is a limit.

Aftertaste is bitter and you get that anise from the brew.

Overall I'm not impressed, but I also didn't expect much. It was a VERY cheap brew and my first tester in the field of AG. I learned a lot and won't make the same mistakes again.

On this beer - I'll give it some time. If it doesn't come together, I'll probably salvage it by dumping them all back into the fermenter and adding a bag or two of DME to get some other flavour in there. Won't toss it - there's no infections or signs thereof, so I'm not too negative about it.

 

[jmarkkaufman]

Thanks for sharing! I’d like to keep learning more about low abv. I just found out about Hairless Dog, local here in MPLS, and is claiming to be the first NA craft brewery. Looking to try it soon.

 

[jmarkkaufman]

And I tried it tonight, the Hairless Dog. Pretty disappointed, tasted like unfermented wort. Hoping you had better success