I have been homebrewing for a little over two years and have come to enjoy the hobby and often bring homebrew to family events. Herein lies the problem. My father is an alcoholic and has 28 years of sobriety under his belt, however, he misses beer and does often partake in non-alcoholic (NA) beers such as odouls, and Heineken 0.0.
With this being the case I feel bad that he cannot partake and well I would like to make at least a portion of my beer NA for my father so that he can enjoy along with the rest of my family.
However, I am not aware of how to accomplish this correctly. So far the only way that I have been able to find has been boiling out the alcohol and kegging but am concerned that this will leave too much residual alcohol.
If anyone has any ideas on how to accomplish this it would be much appreciated.
I don’t think there is a viable way, on the homebrew scale, to make truly NA beer that I would serve to a sober recovering alcoholic. Props to Pops for 28 years sober though! [emoji1598]
I didn’t watch the session yet, but maybe someone did, there was a no alcohol session at HomebrewCon. I’ll leave notes after I check it out unless someone beats me.
Edit: Here is the description.
Brewing up a Non-Alcoholic Beer
6/19/20206:30 pm MT-7:30 pm MT
Track: Recipe Formulation & Improvement
Speaker:
Kara Taylor
Non-alcoholic beer has become an increasing trend in the beer market. Different techniques to remove alcohol exist with specialized equipment, but how can we achieve low alcohol through fermentation? Learn about unusual strains like Saccharomyces ludwigii that can help you brew low-alcohol beer.
It would involve some understanding of the idea of distilling AFAIK, you’d find the temp that alcohol boils at and maintain that temp until as long as the internet says youre required to to remove 99% of the alcohol.
I would kind of say not to worry about it, because for me I can not even drink swill anymore, even getting drunk doesn’t seem worth it when I have to drink macro beers. So, in this case what is the element you believe he wants? Taste of macro beer? Taste of delicious beer? Carbonated drink?
There are alternate answers to those. Don’t take this as dismissive, I just am confused, because beer isn’t just “beer” in a way.
Articles like this one frighten me a bit. It seems to imply that by holding beer in a 180F oven for 30 minutes you can remove all of the alcohol, and to confirm you can simply do a taste test. By 30 minutes you’d be lucky to remove any of the alcohol, and it would take several hours to remove even a significant portion of the alcohol. I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable that I had removed enough alcohol to serve to a recovering alcoholic.
From a homebrewer’s perspective, you could prepare a low-alcohol beer this way, but brewing a true non-alcoholic beer is not possible without specialized equipment and procedures. Commercial NA beers are produced under vacuum or using specialized reverse osmosis filters.
No matter what anyone tells you, you can’t make NA beer at home. You notice that even the HBC session hedges things by saying low alcohol. You can make bad low alcohol beer by heating. I think it’s just something we have to accept.
Yes, it seems apparent that there would be a trade off: alcohol can be removed but also atmospheric exposure + heat = oxidation & flavor degradation. It seems to me that IF one wanted to go this route you could measure your gravity after heating the beer to evaporate alcohol out and get a sense of what your alcohol is after applying heat + time. And no you’re not going to be able to ensure reaching 0 ABV. I’ve recently taken up drinking N/A beers (touted as below 0.5% ABV) because I don’t always want the alcohol but love my beer and have found some commercial N/A’s to my liking; though they tend to be sweet I don’t mind as it’s a malty sort of flavor and some have a nice hops presence and balancing bitterness. One I recently came across is Clausthaler that is dry hopped with cascade, giving it more of a hops charge than others, for those who might like a bit more fresh hop flavored beer that’s low ABV.
I know there are people out there who are trying to crack the nut from the biological point of view. (e.g. using alternative fermentation mechanisms to consume the wort sugars without producing ethanol).
But the other bit that people forget about is food safety. If you make a low alcohol beer, you have to be insanely assiduous about sanitation because it’s a fantastic growth media for stuff that can really hurt you.
I did find some additional information from the google cave.
In order to remove alcohol from soups entirely, it will take approximately 3 hours at a low boil of a minimum of 160 degree’s F. This is a FDA source and though meant for a large pot of soup with 1 to two bottles of wine involved it might be a good starting point.
Additionally, from some friends of mine who have messed up in their brewing, their idea to retain flavors is during the second boil to make a re-addition to hops, and some flavor extracts to bring the flavor back to true.
Also just wanted to say thank you all for the information and other options so far. If I cannot brew it I think I might just have a 1gallon keg filled for him or order one.
Yeah, I think people are being pretty accurate in their assessments.
I once did a kick where I tried a bunch of alcohol-free beers just to see if any were good at all. I remember maisel’s alcoholfrei and if not maisels then some other weisse beer were still pretty decent.
But, I get the feeling he wants the idea of “drinking beer” and bubbles, am i correct? If so, he should probably just drink commercial 0% beer or try to avoid it.
Narcout, a long time forum contributor, has some well done reviews of commercial NA beers in the Commercial Beer Review section of this forum. Just scroll they are not far down, each brand has its own topic.
I can’t remember where I heard about Athletic but I remember it being while I was in Germany and I was like, this is… Peculiar… but if they are making good beer, hell yeah for those who want it!