Non alcoholic beer

[Redcardbrews]

So a friend asked me to brew a non alcoholic beer for his pregnant wife's birthday. I'm looking at doing a ginger wheat. The only thing I've read about removing alcohol from beer is to heat the beer after fermented to 175 for 15-20 min to burn off the alcohol. But doing this will increase the bitterness, so hop schedule and amounts will have to be adjusted. Anyone ever done this or is my buddy just crazy?

 

[GPP33]

I've read about it and thought about trying it with a small batch. If it tastes good it could be kinda fun to have around. The beer will almost certainly change in the process, I'm not sure which style would be best.

 

[microbusbrewery]

Never tried it myself. I had someone at work ask me about it and I figured it would be almost impossible to avoid oxidation without special equipment. Besides, I've never had a commercial non-alcoholic beer (only tried a couple) that I thought was any good. Have you looked at the USDA burn off charts for ethanol? They're based on a study a while back that kind of focused on cooking with alcohol, but it basically indicated that it takes a little longer than most people think to cook off the alcohol. It'd be hard to measure at home exactly how much had cooked off.

 

[mulletmaster]

Hopefully this helps.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=39433

 

[Redcardbrews]

I will have to look that up...I dont really want to brew it it just seems silly to me and if it comes out terrible I've lost a gallon of decent beer for no good reason if I do it I'll post about it

 

[PCL]

Peel the labels off some O'Doul's bottles and hand them over. People asking you to make non-alcoholic beer...what a world we live in

JK. Kinda. Ginger sounds good

 

[timdillon36]

I tried it once and it was ok. I want to play around with it a little more and see if i can make it a little better but what i did is

Made 2 1g starters for my brew day, back to back 10g batches. So it was 1.040 wort in a 1g growler with 1056 in one and 001in the other. No stir plate just a swirl every few hours. On brew day i decanted about 3qt from each and boiled on my stove top for 30 min and added some hops at 30 and FO.

I cant really say how much alcohol was left but the gravity went up which means some alcohol was boiled off. I would guess most of it during a 30 min boil. It was ok to drink but i need to work on the hops a bit more.

I kegged it and took one bottle to share with other home brewers, they agreed it wasnt bad and better then any off the shelf na but why do you want to do that to your beer?

To me it wasnt beer but an experiment in conservation. Like using spent grain to bake, making something out of starter beer.

If i was to do it again i would use more hops and also go straight from boil to keg to keep the o2 down.

The beer was good enough that i drank most of that gallon in one sitting to also test if it got me drunk. It just made me have to pee.

 

[Redcardbrews]

I ended up brewing a simple blonde ale for a co worker and I'm going to take a gallon of it after it's fermented out and attempt to "boil" off the alcohol and add some ginger root as it's cooling

 

[Redcardbrews]

So the ginger blonde came out perfect, my friend tried it and loved everything about it! And she did not get drunk from 2 full bottles so I will call it a success

 

[brandonlovesbeer]

I'd like to try a non alcoholic beer one of these days. Is there a way to measure with a hydrometer to figure out the new ABV after the alcohol boil-off?