I've often heard that phrase that goes something like "Brewers make wort. Yeast make beer." So would you be able to consider wort "beer" just by adding yeast to it when the yeast haven't even done anything yet? I think that beer is the product of what yeast do to the wort. The esters, the alcohols, the various flavor compounds, the biotransformation or whatever. Simply adding dead yeast to a beer that never end up fermenting it or adding viable yeast that just haven't done anything yet does not suddenly transform wort into beer. In fact, if you drank the wort before adding the yeast and then drank the wort after adding the yeast, they would taste 100% the same with zero detectable differences because there literally was no difference. On the other hand, tasting the wort at that point (regardless of whether there is yeast in it or not) and then comparing it to 4 weeks later after the fermentation was completely done, they would taste nothing alike. Beer is the result of wort having been fermented by yeast (and potentially other microorganisms as well) and I doubt anyone could convince me otherwise. Even non-alcoholic beer is usually just regular beer that has had most or all of the alcohol removed from it.
