Even as nonalcoholic craft beer won more headlines and shelf space in recent years, I didn’t have much interest. I’d tried a few, and I’d always found flaws or flavor profiles that turned me off. I saw them like Impossible Burgers or other meat substitutes—a decent alternative for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t enjoy the real deal. Me? I’d rather forgo the burger and eat some veg—or skip the NA IPA and just have an iced tea.
However: A Memorial Day barbecue in a backyard in Echo Park, California, changed my relationship to near-beer. Instead of the usual solitary six-pack of an NA alternative, the hosts had stocked a whole beer cooler with NA options from craft brewers such as Sierra Nevada and Lagunitas, and from specialist NA brands such as Athletic and Partake.
[PAYWALL]
There were IPAs, there were lagers, and there was even some Guiness 0.0. I cracked open a Sierra Nevada Trail Pass and got to mingling. As with a real beer, one can led to two, two led to three … and as the sun dipped below the Hollywood sign, I found myself about five deep. But there was something missing: my beer buzz.
What surprised me was that I didn’t miss it. I still had a wonderful time catching up with old friends and making new ones, and I still got to sip on some tasty, refreshing, and enlivening brews. It was a win-win—and I got another W on Tuesday morning, when I woke without feeling sluggish.
That experience spurred a deeper dive into current NA offerings, and into the tech behind them. Research for this story was fun in a way that drinking proscribed beers rarely is—going through as many craft NA offerings as I could find was fresh and exciting. It felt like discovery. At times, it felt like craft beer felt in 2010: Every new brand confronted my preconceived notions of NA products. Meanwhile, I was tasting and learning on my usually-dry weeknights, or having a second pint at lunch, or sipping from a can at the park.
Sure, there were brews that I didn’t love, and there were some out-of-code cans. But there were also enough eye-opening examples to keep me on the hunt. I even found a few brands that are now regular fixtures in the fridge.
I spoke with a dozen brewers, brewery executives, and equipment manufacturers about how craft breweries handle NA production. Beyond the fascinating technologies behind the brews, I learned about how important these drinks can be to the wider craft-brewing segment.
This isn’t about beer substitutes or beer alternatives. NA beverages represent a cultural shift for the industry.
The Microscopic Menace
NA beer—defined in the United States as having less than 0.5 percent ABV—can be made at almost any craft brewery in the country. If the brewery uses specialized maltose-negative yeasts or carefully controls the amount of fermentables in the wort, no unusual equipment is required.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Making beer without alcohol means that those dangerous microbes—which, in beer, normally can’t survive ethanol’s sanitizing properties—are a constant threat.
“If you don’t know what you are doing, you will grow something that will hurt someone,” says Isaac Showaki, CEO of Octopi Brewing in Waunakee, Wisconsin. Without pasteurization, infection by E. coli, listeria, or salmonella are real risks. That’s a thought that keeps many brewers up at night.
In the brewery, there are two common approaches to pasteurization: flash pasteurization, which occurs in-line between the fermentation vessel and the packaging line, and tunnel pasteurization, which doses packaged beer with precise amounts of heat for specific durations. The food and drink industries measure that combination of heat and time in pasteurization units (PUs). (For more on that, see Pasteurization’s Place in Craft Beer’s Battle.)
It’s a delicate process. Overdo the PUs, and it won’t be just microbes that die off—it’ll be flavor, too. The distinctive twang of cooked hops and oxidized malt in an overheated beer is hard to ignore. On the other hand: Not enough of a heat dose, and pathogens survive in the package. These are the ticking time bombs that haunt brewers’ thoughts in the small hours, and they are what influenced the typically cautious approach to pasteurization that errs on the side of more PUs.
“There’s a fine line between popping cans in the tunnel and not spending enough time in it,” says Joe Chura, founder of Go Brewing in Naperville, Illinois. Go is focused on NA offerings made with “controlled fermentation,” and Chura says the pasteurizer and lab equipment are the most important gear in the brewery.
Tunnel pasteurizers are not only costly machines, but they also require a large footprint in the brewery. Together, these constraints make them a hard sell to any small breweries perpetually short on capital and space. Yet relying on flash pasteurization alone can be risky because equipment or operations downstream have the potential to reinfect the product.
Showaki says one secret to the flavorful and stable NA products brewed at Octopi is the dual pasteurizer approach. “Best practice is to flash high and tunnel low,” he says. The beer—dealcoholized by a reverse osmosis process (we’ll come back to that)—is aggressively flash-pasteurized before carbonation and packaging. A final pass through the tunnel pasteurizer renders the NA brews safe, stable, and ready to drink without the “cooked” flavor common in longer tunnel-pasteurization programs.
The susceptibility to infection is also why it’s rare to see NA brews on draft. Sending NA kegs to the market to face hot trucks, nonrefrigerated storage, and questionably clean draft lines is a recipe for more brewer’s insomnia.
Pre-installation at Go Brewing in Naperville, Illinois.
Photo: Courtesy Go Brewing
One into Two: The NA-Brewing Magic Trick
Besides controlling fermentation, the other key technique for creating NA beer is to remove the alcohol from the fermented beer. Dealcoholization comes in a few flavors, but vacuum separation (often called vacuum distillation) and reverse-osmosis systems (also called membrane separation) are the most popular.
Vacuum separation is a 20th-century innovation. While effective, it can expose beer to high-enough temperatures to adversely affect delicate flavor compounds—especially hops. Membrane systems, meanwhile, work at lower temperatures as they pull the ethanol (and the water) from the carbohydrates, proteins, and other compounds.
Both methods have their proponents, and there are dealcoholization systems available from the major brewing-equipment manufacturers such as Alfa Laval and GEA. Meanwhile, innovators in the space are actively improving both technologies.
While an established recipe can be dealcoholized, packaged, and pasteurized to create the NA version of an existing brand, that’s not the most successful approach. It’s best to adjust the starting point to compensate for the subtle flavor changes wrought by these systems. Ethanol may be considered “flavorless,” but its absence is certainly perceptible to beer drinkers. Small tweaks to gravity, IBUs, and hopping regimens can improve the final flavor profiles of the dealcoholized product.
So, what happens to ethanol that gets separated from the fermented beer? At Octopi, they handle this output differently from most producers.
“We throw it away,” Showaki says. For the high-volume facility, production throughput is more important than salvaging the ethanol, and the logistics of capturing and processing what they consider waste would be a distraction from the beverages they’re contracted to brew.
A lot of work—by brewers and by the yeast—goes into creating that ethanol, and other producers say they treasure the ethanol they pull out of their fermentations. This easy-to-monetize “waste” stream is a selling point for membrane-separation equipment.
“One product goes in, two products come out,” says Ben Jordan, CEO of Minnesota-based ABV Technology, about the company’s Equalizer dealcoholization machine. It uses a hybrid approach, marrying vacuum separation with reverse-osmosis membrane.
Jordan patiently explains the inner workings of the system in detail—and then explains it again, in broader terms, as I struggle to grasp the finer points of fluid dynamics, micron-mesh mediums, and vacuum rectification. It’s a complex process, but the results are easy to grasp. There are two output streams: The first is a clear water-and-ethanol solution at the same alcoholic strength as the input beverage; the second is all the flavors, sugars, proteins, colors, and aromas of the input beverage, which gets reconstituted with deaerated RO water. ABV Technology calls the first output a “flavored malt beverage base” (FMB) and the second one “a cereal beverage.”
Three Weavers Brewing in Inglewood, California, uses an Equalizer to create three NA styles: a lager, a West Coast IPA, and a hazy IPA. Director of brewing operations Chris Gonzales says it took a few months of R&D to dial in the recipes.
“Hops can be the hard part,” he says, because “you lose a little” in the process. However, the new cold-side hop products can help punch up those NA IPAs after dealcoholization. The FMB output—that’s the alcoholic water—goes into large brite tanks to be the base for their Grdn Prty range of Collins-inspired, fruit-flavored hard seltzers.
Gonzales says the biggest challenge with the ABV Technology system is production scheduling. Between brewing the base beer and the dealcoholization process, followed immediately by canning and pasteurization, it can be tricky to fit a run into a busy calendar. Then there’s the blending, flavoring, and packaging of the seltzers after that.
“We basically have to dedicate two whole days to NA production,” he says.
ABV Technology has a solution for producers who can’t or don’t want to deal with the Equalizer’s FMB output—and often, these are wineries making NA or low-ABV wines. “We have a TTB-bonded warehouse, and we’ll buy the FMB back from them,” Jordan says. There are plenty of companies looking for seltzer base, and ABV Technology turns this potential waste stream into a commodity.
Jordan says it’s part of their service-centered model. If you want to make NA beer but don’t want to drop $300,000 on an Equalizer, ABV will rent you one month-to-month or hook you up with a partner facility that can handle the dealcoholization for you.
The Cutting Edge of Cutting Out Booze
Based in North Carolina, Bare Brews also takes a service-provider approach with their proprietary membrane-separation system. They install theirs on a trailer—along with a deaerated water generator and pasteurizer—for a mobile dealcoholization solution.
“A lot of brewers and winemakers don’t want to invest in dealcoholization gear, but they want to offer NA products,” says Bare Brews founder Charles Dick. “But we can do more than show up at the brewery and hook up their tanks. We work with brewers to R&D better base beers, so they get what they want out of the [dealcoholization] process.”
The results are an NA beer (or wine) and enough FMB base to pay for the whole process. “It’s pretty easy to make okay NA beer, but it’s real hard to make it great,” says cofounder Collin Stone. The secret sauce to their tech, which he calls “Membrane 2.0,” is extensive automation and AI integration. The value proposition is tough to ignore, and the team hopes to have coast-to-coast coverage within two years.
Sustainable Beverage Technologies, based in Golden, Colorado, offers a whole ecosystem of next-generation beer-making equipment, anchored by their BrewVo system. A dealcoholization system built around membrane separation, the BrewVo didn’t start out as a way to make NA beer. “I wanted to shrink the footprint of craft beer and find a way to move it more efficiently,” says SBT founder Patrick Tatera.
Tatera was working on a way to separate beer from all its water to make it easier to ship, combined with a way to reconstitute that beer concentrate without losing any quality. It’s harder to separate ethanol from water than it is to separate ethanol and water from beer; during R&D, they discovered if they simply didn’t add the alcohol back during reconstitution, the result was an NA beer that tastes more like the full-strength stuff. Deschutes in Bend, Oregon, is using that tech to make their award-winning Black Butte Non-Alcoholic Porter.
More than just a membrane separator, BrewVo is a whole proprietary brewing process using what Tatera calls “nested fermentations—like brewing a beer inside of itself.” Each fermentation provides an opportunity to add ingredients or tweak variables to the finished product. The process then separates the ethanol from the brew, resulting in a dense beer syrup with five to seven times the flavor intensity of the base. They call this syrup “Multi Brewed Beer,” or MBB. The brewery can then immediately blend the MBB with water, carbonate, and package—or, it can ship the MBB to an end user who will handle those final steps.
There’s another piece in the SBT ecosystem: NexDraft. It’s a draft system that eschews standard kegs for MBB concentrates, packaged bag-in-box and remixed with both water and ethanol at the point of dispense. Currently in the beta-testing phase, the idea behind NexDraft is to provide fresher, easier-to-handle draft beer—as well as a choose-your-own-ABV type of ordering where the drinker can ask for NA, full-strength, or even session-strength pours of the same beer from the same draft faucet.
Bare Brews alcohol removal in action.
Photo: Courtesy Bare Brews
What Comes Next
At Go Brewing in Illinois, the guest taps in the tasting room are alcoholic craft beers, but there are also a dozen taps pouring Go’s NA styles. Made without dealcoholization, the styles rely on restrained malt bills and carefully controlled fermentation using standard brewer’s yeast strains.
“It’s a finesse game,” Chura says. “We focus on specialty malts because they bring more flavor.”
Beyond advances in hop-extract products and specialty yeasts designed for NA fermentations, some brewers are looking forward to developments in low-diastatic malt varieties that could lend more flavor with less gravity. The NA brewing techniques are developing faster than the supply chain—but as that gap narrows, we can expect NA brews to get even better.
There is growing demand for flavorful adult beverages without all the calories, carbs, and intoxication that ethanol brings to the party, and brewers are taking notice. There are more NA beer producers working to perfect their craft than ever before, and that’s because there are more people drinking NA beer than ever before.
It’s an exciting time, even if you have no interest in near-beer. From the dial-an-ABV promise of NexDraft to flavorful and functional NA alternatives to the dulling double IPAs, giving drinkers more control over their alcohol intake is all upside. The NA options also bring more people into the craft-brewing world—those folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t consume alcohol are no longer left out of the party at the local tasting room or beer bar.
What was once considered an alternative to traditional beer is becoming just another beverage. “The stigma is gone,” Chura says.
In its place is a sense of adventure and discovery that I haven’t felt since the days of bomber bottles and amber ales. And, I suspect, we’ll remember the details of this journey with more clarity.
