Strange question..... How to Make Non alcoholic beer?

[Elysium]

I read a post a while back that someone used a french press and boiling water to make a hop tea. They then added this back to the NA brew and there you have it. My strategy would be to estimate the volume lost from the second boil when you drive off alcohol, then use that much water to make a hop tea. You end up with the same volume as before and get your hop flavor and aroma in there.

Brilliant idea

There is one small problem: hop utilization.

The amount of water that boils off......is little and the hops that you boil in that much water wont impart as much flavour/aroma as boiling in a full, say, 5-gallon beer. I need to find again what Palmer says about this....he gives the curve of hop utilization.

but then again....brilliant idea. Thanks.

 

[dstranger99]

What if I were to put a bunch of whole hops into a tea bag and make 2 or 3 cups of it, or would pellet hops work better ?

 

[Elysium]

What if I were to put a bunch of whole hops into a tea bag and make 2 or 3 cups of it, or would pellet hops work better ?

Why would you put them in a tea bag? Isnt it easier to put them in the liquid and filter the liquid afterwards? Surely less messier, but I wouldnt constrain hops in a tea bag......I think it is better, regarding utilization, if they are freely floating.
Then again.....read my previous comment...it might make you look into Palmer's book and the part where he talks about hop utilization. It is mainly connected to time more than anything else and he talks about how bitterness utilization is dependent on the boil time.....so, I might be talking total rubbish here.
I guess we just have to try our ideas out and come back to tell about them.

 

[dstranger99]

Why would you put them in a tea bag? Isnt it easier to put them in the liquid and filter the liquid afterwards? Surely less messier, but I wouldnt constrain hops in a tea bag......I think it is better, regarding utilization, if they are freely floating.
Then again.....read my previous comment...it might make you look into Palmer's book and the part where he talks about hop utilization. It is mainly connected to time more than anything else and he talks about how bitterness utilization is dependent on the boil time.....so, I might be talking total rubbish here.
I guess we just have to try our ideas out and come back to tell about them.

My thinking on that is while 1/2 my batch is in the oven, I can simply add the hop tea once the booze has been burned off, then cool it down, and have it ready to rack for bottling without having hop gunk to deal with.

 

[angryyoungman]

As far as the hop utilization I don't really know a whole lot about it to be honest. But I am not certain that iso- alpha acids would boil off during a secondary boil. Most of the experiments I have read or heard about from other home brewers is that the hop bitterness, from the iso- alphas, stays behind after a second boil to drive off alcohol, but all the flavor and aroma of the hops will disappear. My idea would be that because the flavor and aroma hops are added later they have a fairly low rate of hop utilization and contribute next to no iso- alpha acids.
From my understanding it would appear that a second boil to get rid of alcohol drives off the normal alpha acids, and leaves behinds the iso-alpha acids. So if you do a regular boil after the mash, and a normal early bittering addition, you will retain all the iso-aplhas, and all the bitterness. Then, when you do the second boil to get rid of the alcohol you won't need to concern yourself with adding any bitterness, just aroma and flavor. So boil the "hop tea" for 15 minutes and add the usual flavor and aroma additions at the same time. Combine the tea with the aroma and flavor with the non-alcoholic brew (which should have retained the iso-alphas) and, theoretically, you will get the non-alcoholic brew with all the hop bitterness, as well as the flavor and aroma.
Heck, you could probably add the priming sugar to the hop tea boil and kill to birds with one stone.
I hope that all made sense and wasn't terribly complicated or repetitive.

 

[angryyoungman]

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/hop-utilization-123942/

This thread has a hop utilization chart. As you can see, there is very, very little hop utilization under a 30 minute boil. The aroma and flavor hops are usually added during the last 15 minutes of the boil, so they would contribute very little iso-alpha acids and therefore have very little impact on overall hop utilization. So... That's all.
Heck, if you really, realllllyyyyyy wanted a hoppy non-alcoholic brew you could do the hop tea thing, boil off the alcohol, then dry hop (in a hop bag) it in a keg. After a few days, take the dry hop bag out, carb the keg and be ready to go.

 

[DWes]

Just getting back into brewing after a hiatus of about ten years and I stumbled across this thread.

The answer to the original poster's question is that you can make NA beer at home using vacuum distillation.

About 15 years ago I wrote an article on the process for the old Homebrew Digest listserve. It is a bit formal, but I was doing a lot of scientific writing at the time. Anyway, here is the link. You need to scroll down almost to the bottom to find the articles.

http://hbd.org/hbd/archive/2973.html

Enjoy!

One thing it does not mention in the article is that I did a series of experiments on stock solutions of ethanol in water to figure out how much volume you needed to evaporate to get a 5% alcohol solution down to 0.5% My memory is that it was between a third and a quarter of the volume of the beer.

Hoptech used to sell hop extracts that would put back some of the aromatics.

 

[sail681]

I have 5 gallons of fermented Pale Ale that I am about to bottle. Planning to take 48oz from the batch and do the 30 minute + 180degree heat cycle to burn off the alcohol.

My question is about how to calculate my yeast & sugar need to carbonate it. Here is what I have:
-5 pints of rinsed yeast from the primary which I intend to pitch after cooling the 48 oz. HOW MUCH SHOULD I POUR INTO THE 48 OZ BATCH???? 1/4 CUP, 1 TABLESPOON...ETC
-Based on my usual add of 4.5oz of boiled sugar water (in 1 cup water) to a 5 gallon batch, I intend to add .3oz of boiled sugar to the chilled liquid

Thoughts????

 

[JimRausch]

Hi. When I have done it in the past, I would prime the entire batch as usual, then pull off the 1st gallon and heat that to 170-180 and hold it for 1/2 hour. After cooling, I added back 1 tsp yeast slurry and bottled. When I didn't have any slurry, I added about 1/4 pkt. of Muntons cheapo yeast. Those are 7gm pkts. so that would make it 1.5-2gm. Worked for me.
Good luck!

 

[noisycm]

An ethanol-water phase diagram might be instructive to people talking about separation limits.

NA brewers are interested in the left side of the diagram because they are interested in concentrating water. The theoretical limit to concentrating water by adding heat is 100%. There are practical limits that others have mentioned like time, cost, and impurities. Using a distillation column with a reflux could even eliminate most of water lost with the alcohol. Just keep in mind you are concentrating what distillers call the tail - high in fusel alcohols that give headaches.

Distillers are concentrating alcohol, so they are interested in the right side of the diagram. The inflection point is called an azeotrope where the solution of 96% alcohol and 4% water (at 1 atmosphere of pressure) boils at a lower temperature than either constituent. There are many methods to "break" the azeotrope. Pressure-swing distillation shifts the azeotrope by altering the pressure and allows a theoretical alcohol concentration of 100%. Distillers don't do this because they add water after concentrating anyway. There's also methanol in the head cut - the stuff that makes you go blind. The head and tail are discarded while the heart is kept for drinking. Depending on what they're making determines how closely distillers cut to the heart.

 

[mbraceable]

Me again.

I know this must be a strange question but is there a way to make homemade NON alcoholic beer? Reason I ask is because my husband does not drink alcohol. However he LOVES beer. He just had way too many back in the day and has been off the sauce for 15 years. Whenever we dine out, he always gets Buckler, Clausthaler or Kaliber.

Try your local beer store for BitBurger. It has 0% alcohol.