Why on earth would I want to make a Non-Alcoholic beer? Good Question!
There are lots of reasons behind why people eschew alcohol. I won't get into any of them here. The point is that there are many people who avoid alcohol, but still want the taste of beer from time to time. For these people, the mass-market commercial options are extremely limited. They can have N/A Pale Lager, N/A Amber Lager, N/A Hefewiezen (if they're lucky) and that's pretty much it.
What happens if that person wants something else? They're out of luck, unless they happen to live near a Craft Brewery that brews additional styles of N/A beer. For everyone else, the answer is to brew your own.
The first thing to understand about N/A beer (commercial, or otherwise) is that it isn't truly free of alcohol. It actually contains around 0.5% of the stuff. That news is important when we get to carbonation below.
What styles work best for N/A beer? My recommendation is anything that isn't hoppy like an IPA, or potent like Barleywines and Strong Belgians. This is because driving off the alcohol also drives off hop flavor and aroma. In addition, removing alcohol from beers that rely upon its character is rather pointless, as far as I'm concerned. With that in mind, I've decided to focus my efforts on Mild, Porter, Stout and other malt-driven styles with relatively low alcohol contents.
The basic technique behind N/A beer is to heat the beer to the boiling point of ethyl alcohol and hold it there until the alcohol evaporates. The magic temp is 173.3F. Since I don't have that level of temperature control, I heat the beer to a few degrees above that and hold it there for approximately 30 minutes. Of course, losing the alcohol also means losing liquid, which needs to be replaced with water. Although you can calculate how much alcohol you're going to lose and add the equivalent amount of water before doing the evaporation, Talking Barbi says "Math Class is tough." It's much simpler to measure out the volume of beer you want to make N/A, remove the alcohol and then add enough distilled or boiled water back until you have the same volume of liquid you started with. It's really just that easy.
Carbonation is where things get a little complicated. If you can force-carbonate, feel free to stop reading now. If you bottle-condition like me, please read on.
Heating your beer does more than get rid of the alcohol. It also kills off any yeast that may have been alive and well. This presents a bit of a problem at bottling time, because normally you simply add priming sugar, bottle you beer and let the yeast do its thing.
The solution is to introduce active yeast back into the beer. This doesn't mean simply tossing some dry yeast into the bottling bucket. It means making a starter, just like you probably did when you first brewed the beer.
The starter itself doesn't need to be too terribly big. You only need enough to get the yeast active, because just like with your regular beer, you'll be adding priming sugar. Being a Grade A nerd, I prefer making the starter using the same yeast strain I fermented the beer with. The magic amount is around a half-cup of starter per case of beer. If you go much higher, the taste of the un-hopped starter will creep into the finished beer. The quantity of priming sugar should be the same as what you would've used for the beer's alcoholic cousins.
My fist experiment with making N/A beer started with the Northern Brewer Dubbel kit that I got such a good deal on. Sighting my own recommendations, Dubbel isn't the best style to take N/A, but I had five gallons of the stuff. Sacrificing a six-pack worth as part of an experiment would be no great loss if my science project failed miserably.
So how did my first attempt go? Not too shabby.
As I noted in my review of the Kit, I thought the beer was a little too boozy for the style. Since my N/A version didn't have any booze, that part of the beer's profile was MIA. The rest of the beer was pretty much the same, with a light bitterness, plus a nice mix of dark fruits, biscuits and a little spice.
I will mention that my recommendation of not going too crazy with your Starter size can be traced backed to this beer. I got a little generous, so there was some bonus sweetness at work that tasted nothing like the parent beer.
My next N/A attempt was with my Experimental Porter. Rather than tell you how that worked out here, you'll have to wait for the in-depth side by side comparison that will be in that beer's Out of the Bottle piece. Let's just say for now that it worked out quite well.
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