N/A Homebrewing?

I tried once, but had no luck with it. I'm also interested in any sucessful attempts.

I'm especially interested in those processes that don't de-alcolize beer, but make it with non-alcholic-producing ingredients.

 

I have no personal experience making non-alcoholic beer (I have no interest) but from my reading the typical way to do this via homebrewing is to remove the alcohol (e.g., ‘cooking’ the beer):

https://www.midwestsupplies.com/blogs/bottled-knowledge/how-do-you-make-non-alcoholic-beer

For professional brewers there are specialty yeast which could be used; for example from Escarpment labs:

https://escarpmentlabs.com/products/nay-non-alcoholic

Hopefully some BA who has successfully (i.e., a tasty beer) homebrewed a non-alcoholic beer will chime into this thread.

Cheers!

 

Welcome to the BA site, stetsonweizen2010. You've joined a site where You can learn a lot about beer, but this topic has never been discussed as far as I know. Future posts should be very informative.

I think the breweries that successfully put NA beers on the market do so by brewing with a period of fermentation and then somehow remove the alcohol that is produced. But that removal process probably takes some special equipment that's not available to homebrewers. I don't have a clue about whether standard ingredients are used in this process and the alcohol removal process changes the normal flavors to something that's non beerlike, or if a substitute has to be used for the normal malts. It's a mystery.

That leaves the method that @OldBrewer is looking for. Using substitutes for the malt to minimize the alcohol production (or eliminate it entirely) is essentially making a tea of the ingredients, but if the right ingredients can be found to successfully produce an NA beer, then I'd be interested in brewing that type of beer too.

So let's see where this thread goes. I'd sure like to find something that's better than the available commercial offerings.

Edit: I just saw that you created a thread in the Beer Talk forum too.

 

I just found this.

Here's an overview of two of the processes (alcohol reduction and prevention, and deacoholization). The alcohol reduction and prevention process (which I'm interested in) includes several different processes:

1. No fermentation;
2. Limited or arrested fermentation; and
3. Utilization of special yeast.

As @PapaGoose03 mentioned above, the dealcoholization process involves special equipment, not readily available to homebrewers.

https://www.getgruvi.com/blogs/posts/how-is-non-alcoholic-beer-made

 

Here is an episode of the Experimental Brewing podcast that may be helpful:

https://www.experimentalbrew.com/podcast/brew-files-113-yeah-nay-beer

A word of warning. Alcohol is one of the ingredients in beer that suppresses microbial activity. If you're going to brew something with minimal alcohol, make sure you are controlling microbial growth in your beer. I believe Guinness had to recall a bunch of their non-alcoholic beer for this reason. If you're a fan of sour beer, that would be an easy way to control microbes—a pH below 3.5 is a pretty safe environment I believe.

Also I don't want to make any assumptions about your situation, but I remember Stan Hieronymus quoting someone saying, "Non-alcoholic beer is for non-alcoholics." I guess the point being that NA beer could be an on-ramp to problem drinking. Again I don't mean to imply anything, just noting it for anyone thinking about this issue.

Edited to add: Here's that Hieronymus blog post:

https://appellationbeer.com/blog/crossing-cultures-nostril-news-grundy-tanks/

Edited again: I guess he was quoting a New Yorker piece:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/27/an-ex-drinkers-search-for-a-sober-buzz

 

I think the trick is creating a relatively unfermentable, low-gravity wort and then using microbes that don't eat everything brewing yeast would ordinarily eat. I don't think it's a lot more complicated than that.

I'm not sure you need to pasteurize, by the way. I've never brewed NA beer so definitely don't take my word for it, but I think you could probably get comfortable on safety without pasteurizing the beer. To repeat my earlier point, it obviously helps if you're brewing a sour, because low pH is highly effective against pathogens. But even non-sour beer typically has a pH in the safe range, you just need to be 100% sure you get there because you don't have the added safety of significant alcohol content.