Sixmilecross
Well-Known Member
This just made my day
Reading this made me think of my stay at Eskan Village. Odouls was served at the rec center. A few gallon containers of Welches grape and apple juice, bread yeast, sugar, and a pack of condoms turned our closet into a class 6 those were the days!
How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made
Non-alcoholic beer (or NA beer, as it's sometimes called) starts its life as a normal beer. In fact it goes through almost the full process, from making a mash, boiling the wort, adding hops, and even fermenting. Here's the fork in the road, though. While regular beer will then be bottled (or canned or kegged) and aged, non-alcoholic beer has to have its alcohol removed.
The most common way that alcohol is removed from beer is through heating. As we've discussed in several previous articles, alcohol has a much lower boiling point than water. At sea level, it's roughly 173 degrees F. The fermented beer is heated up to that point and kept there until the solution is only 0.5 percent ABV. However, heating changes the flavor of the beer significantly, because you're cooking all of the ingredients again. To minimize this, some operations practice vacuum distilling. Depending on the power of the vacuum, the alcohol's boiling point may be lowered as far as 120 degrees, which is much less disruptive to the flavors. (With a much more powerful vacuum the alcohol could be made to simply evaporate at temperatures lower than 50 degrees F, however these sorts of vacuums are not used for large scale vacuum distilling.)
Another technique that's sometimes employed is reverse-osmosis. As Chow.com explains it, "...beer is passed through a filter with pores so small that only alcohol and water (and a few volatile acids) can pass through. The alcohol is distilled out of the alcohol-water mix using conventional distillation methods, and the water and remaining acids are added back into the syrupy mixture of sugars and flavor compounds left on the other side of the filter. Bingo—a nonalcoholic (or dealcoholized, as winemakers call it) brew." Because the main ingredients aren't heated, this technique causes less flavor degradation, so it gives generally preferable results, though it's more labor intensive and requires more equipment.
Even after the alcohol is removed, we're not done yet. We've got some liquid that tastes reasonably like beer, but it's flat. Most respectable beer carbonates itself as it finishes out the fermentation process inside its bottle. As yeast is metabolizing sugar into alcohol, one of the byproducts is CO2, which gives you bubbles. However, our now non-alcoholic brew has no more yeast and it isn't fermenting. Most producers of non-alcoholic beer simply inject the brew with CO2 during the bottling (or kegging or canning) process. So it's really sort of a beer-flavored soda. Others will toss in a little bit of starter yeast with a little more sugar and let it ferment in the bottles, but this is a trickier process, since you are liable to reintroduce a small amount of alcohol. Also, your bottles may explode if you do it wrong.
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