Alcohol Free Beer Brewing (Dont hurt me!)

[J-Warnie]

Be patient and if your not interested scroll on....

Im a well seasoned brewer and due to health reasons i stopped brewing and drinking a few years ago. I drink carlton Zeros in social situations but long for a good zero beer that has some hop profile about it.

Has anyone played with boiling off the alcohol post fermentation?

Process I'm thinking is as follows

- Mash as per normal (High end 68-70c)
- Boil and skip a 60 min addition, add 40, 20 and 0 min additions
- Chill and Ferment as per normal
- once fermentation has completed, cold crash it for a few days
- Drain beer off the yeast as clean as possible back into the boil pot and set the temp to 80c
- Once its at 80c, throw a hop addition in and let it stay there for 30-40 mins
- Chill and straight into a keg

I'm going to have a crack sometime soon and see how it works out but would love to hear if anyone has ever played with it and had any good results.

 

[J-Warnie]

I might add by Zero i dont mean 0.0 as i know this would be impossible but 0.5% should be achievable, Id soon know if it had too much residue alcohol

 

[MHB]

Worth a try, just a couple of points to think about: -
Heat will change the flavour
Alcohol is part of the flavour taking it out will change the taste.
Alcohol vapor is very flammable, be careful if working indoors! Note that inhaling alcohol is pretty much the same as drinking it. Fuel air explosives have been called a "poor mans nuke" they can be impressive (from a good distance) but you don't want to be in the middle of one.

Read up on Malta (not the island the drink). A lot of recipes include Molasses, personally I have had pretty good results by running off a portion of a boiling wort at about 10 minutes after the hop addition (I'm doing much bigger batches), just put it in a no-chill cube until required.
Filter to a keg, carbonate and consume... If you were making a whole batch you should be OK adding the hops to the cube.
Remember you have little or no infection protection once the NC cube is opened so get into the fridge and under pressure ASAP.
Mark

 

[Schikitar]

I can't comment on your process above but you could try brewing Brewdog's Nanny State if in a pinch - https://brewdogrecipes.com/recipes/nanny-state

 

[rizrah]

i remember reading somewhere about putting some beer in the oven at 80deg and leaving it there for 2 hours to remove the alcohol.
could be worth a small scale trial?
i would think if its that easy and tastes okay then the big breweries would be doing alcohol free "craft beer" and it would be all over the place.

 

[rizrah]

i remember reading somewhere about putting some beer in the oven at 80deg and leaving it there for 2 hours to remove the alcohol.
could be worth a small scale trial?
i would think if its that easy and tastes okay then the big breweries would be doing alcohol free "craft beer" and it would be all over the place.

found it (https://www.thoughtco.com/boiling-point-of-alcohol-608491)

• Baking a recipe containing alcohol resulted in alcohol retention ranging from 25 percent (1 hour baking time) to 45 percent (25 minutes, no stirring). A recipe had to be baked 2 hours or longer to bring the alcohol content down to 10 percent or lower.

 

[Brewer Tom]

I've made a zero English bitter before, after ferment put on the stove and get to about 80deg. You'll smell the alcohol at this point, hold for about 20 min. Keg to get the carbonation, if you bottle you need priming sugar which means you'll get some alcohol.
Comes out ok for a zero, apparently hop bitterness increases dramatically so try low hop styles to begin with. Worth experimenting on kits until you get your feel.

 

[MHB]

That would be 10% of what you started with (from say 5% to 0.5%), likewise 25% at 1 hour would be from 5% to 1.25%
And I would be real careful with those numbers.
Mark

Edit
Meant to say, make sure you get rid of all the yeast in fermented beer. Cooking yeast produces lots of off flavours and aromas so do all you can to get rid of yeast, fine well, cold store, filter...
M

 

[Garfield]

I've made a zero English bitter before, after ferment put on the stove and get to about 80deg. You'll smell the alcohol at this point, hold for about 20 min. Keg to get the carbonation, if you bottle you need priming sugar which means you'll get some alcohol.

How do you bottle condition a pasteurised beer? Do you add fresh yeast when you bottle?

 

[Tim Smith]

Just thinking outside the box and saw this post on another topic, could you use this instead with the wort?

https://wellnessmama.com/8942/ginger-bug/

It does say it can be used with other roots or juices.

 

[prideofthesouth]

I've made a zero English bitter before, after ferment put on the stove and get to about 80deg. You'll smell the alcohol at this point, hold for about 20 min. Keg to get the carbonation, if you bottle you need priming sugar which means you'll get some alcohol.
Comes out ok for a zero, apparently hop bitterness increases dramatically so try low hop styles to begin with. Worth experimenting on kits until you get your feel.

This won't achieve a zero ABV, probably closer to light if you already started with a lowish ABV.

 

[WEF]

Buy some ready made wort, water it down to your SG, dry hop it then prime it with CO2!

 

[contrarian]

I have done this exact experiment as my wife gave up drinking and wanted me to brew an alcohol free beer for her. I used the Nanny State recipe linked above and just made a few substitutions based on what grains and hops I actually had available. From memory it was a small grain bill with predominantly crystal malts and wheat, a high mash temp and a target gravity after the boil of about 1.009 which fermented down to 1.007 giving around 0.5% ABV. There were a lot of late hops and dry hops which give plenty of flavour and aroma.

The end product is pretty tasty. It is a much thinner mouthfeel than a full strength beer but still has some body and plenty of flavour. A number of my brewing mates have tried and enjoyed this with the general consensus being that it is surprisingly good for what it is. and definitely much better than commercial 0% beers.

I think this process could also work well for a stout or dark hoppy beer and I am thinking about trying a very light lager but I think it would require some late hops for it to not just taste like water.

Just remember that if you bottle you are adding another 0.5% roughly to the total ABV.

 

[Luxo_Aussie]

I've been doing some research to make an very low alcohol beer (for the designated drivers) & found an excellent thread (page #4 has his key findings) in the UK where someone has thoroughly documented their efforts at a very low alcohol beer. I was going to follow Nanny State but I feel that's over-hopped for the amount of malt and would result is a BU:GU ratio which wouldn't make it session-able.

I'll be having a crack at something similar later in the year, but plan to follow many of the points brought up in post #63 on page 4.

Best of luck, no shame in seeking out a low alcohol / alcohol free brew!