A good friend of mine is on some pretty heavy duty medication which means no consumption of alcohol. This got me to thinking about some basic physics and that alcohol evaporates at less than 100C.
Without getting into the science of it, I tried a quick and imprecise method of lowering alcohol the other day - and was pleasantly surprised with the results.
Step 1: Pour beer (in our case a hefeweissen) from tap into PET bottle (to get the right volume for later).
Step 2: Pour beer into open saucepan and heat gently until simmering. (And smell the alcohol evaporating - just like a still for those who've operated one).
Step 3: Allow beer in saucepan to chill sufficiently and then pour back into PET bottle.
Step 4: Chill and then gas the contents. In our case we have one of those cap thingys that allows you to gas up a PET bottle with a standard gas fitting.
Step 5: Drink and enjoy as much of it as you want.
The result was much better than I had expected. While I don't know exactly what % alcohol was left (if any - anybody got any ideas about how to measure?), the result was not that dissimilar to the original beer. It had less flavour and was a bit sterile in that clean commercial lager sense. If anything, the flavour was slightly sweeter as though caramelised.
While this may not be a very kind thing to do to a nicely crafted beer, for special occasions like this one the effort is worth it. I could certainly have kept drinking this modified beer all night without any trouble. Still much nicer than most beer you can buy.
cheers, Arnie