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How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made
- Apr 20, 2016
- helen
- 7998
- brewery
How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made
Part 1:
A (Very) Brief History
Non-alcoholic beer first started popping up in the U.S. in 1919. Why? Prohibition. It was decided that the strongest a beverage could be is 0.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV). If that number sounds familiar, it's because that percentage has stuck, and "non-alcoholic" beers today still have 0.5 percent ABV as their upper limit. So, some of the large breweries began making "near beer," stuff that was very pale, didn't have much flavor, and was right at 0.5 percent ABV.
Thirteen years later, Prohibition was banished like the abomination it was, but something had happened in that time. A lot of people had developed a taste for that super light, bland (compared to the ales of the day) beer—a sort of alcoholic Stockholm Syndrome. For the breweries that had been making the "near beer" during Prohibition, it was pretty easy for them to carry on as usual, but they left more of the alcohol in. This is a partial explanation for the popularity of the light, bland lagers (Miller, Coors, Pabst, Bud, etc.) in the U.S., though it should be noted that even science cannot fully explain that particular proclivity.
Part 2:
How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made
Non-alcoholic beer (or NA beer, as it's sometimes called) starts its life as a normal beer. In fact it goes through almost the full process, from making a mash, boiling the wort, adding hops, and even fermenting. Here's the fork in the road, though. While regular beer will then be bottled (or canned or kegged) and aged, non-alcoholic beer has to have its alcohol removed.
The most common way that alcohol is removed from beer is through heating. As we've discussed in several previous articles, alcohol has a much lower boiling point than water. At sea level, it's roughly 173 degrees F. The fermented beer is heated up to that point and kept there until the solution is only 0.5 percent ABV. However, heating changes the flavor of the beer significantly, because you're cooking all of the ingredients again. To minimize this, some operations practice vacuum distilling. Depending on the power of the vacuum, the alcohol's boiling point may be lowered as far as 120 degrees, which is much less disruptive to the flavors. (With a much more powerful vacuum the alcohol could be made to simply evaporate at temperatures lower than 50 degrees F, however these sorts of vacuums are not used for large scale vacuum distilling.)
Part 1:
A (Very) Brief History
Non-alcoholic beer first started popping up in the U.S. in 1919. Why? Prohibition. It was decided that the strongest a beverage could be is 0.5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV). If that number sounds familiar, it's because that percentage has stuck, and "non-alcoholic" beers today still have 0.5 percent ABV as their upper limit. So, some of the large breweries began making "near beer," stuff that was very pale, didn't have much flavor, and was right at 0.5 percent ABV.
Thirteen years later, Prohibition was banished like the abomination it was, but something had happened in that time. A lot of people had developed a taste for that super light, bland (compared to the ales of the day) beer—a sort of alcoholic Stockholm Syndrome. For the breweries that had been making the "near beer" during Prohibition, it was pretty easy for them to carry on as usual, but they left more of the alcohol in. This is a partial explanation for the popularity of the light, bland lagers (Miller, Coors, Pabst, Bud, etc.) in the U.S., though it should be noted that even science cannot fully explain that particular proclivity.
Part 2:
How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made
Non-alcoholic beer (or NA beer, as it's sometimes called) starts its life as a normal beer. In fact it goes through almost the full process, from making a mash, boiling the wort, adding hops, and even fermenting. Here's the fork in the road, though. While regular beer will then be bottled (or canned or kegged) and aged, non-alcoholic beer has to have its alcohol removed.
The most common way that alcohol is removed from beer is through heating. As we've discussed in several previous articles, alcohol has a much lower boiling point than water. At sea level, it's roughly 173 degrees F. The fermented beer is heated up to that point and kept there until the solution is only 0.5 percent ABV. However, heating changes the flavor of the beer significantly, because you're cooking all of the ingredients again. To minimize this, some operations practice vacuum distilling. Depending on the power of the vacuum, the alcohol's boiling point may be lowered as far as 120 degrees, which is much less disruptive to the flavors. (With a much more powerful vacuum the alcohol could be made to simply evaporate at temperatures lower than 50 degrees F, however these sorts of vacuums are not used for large scale vacuum distilling.)
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