Non-Alcoholic Brew

[damon1212]

OK, this is probably the wrong place to post this thread, since it is supposed to be "favorite" recipes etc.

But I have a friend with a wedding coming up . . .a shotgun wedding to be exact.

OK, there's no shotgun, but nevertheless she is prematurely in a "delicate condition".

So I told her I would brew 5 gallons for her wedding, and she said "can't you brew O'Douls or something?

I'm guessing that is something with technology best left to the big brewers, but I thought it would be at least asking the question.

Can we homebrewers brew a non-alcoholic beer? Other than root beer I mean?

[Mylo]

I suppose if you had access to a vacuum chamber (or a really tall moutain) - you could heat your "soon to be crappy n/a beer" to just under water boiling temps, and drive off all the alcohol (for shame!). The altitude and/or vacuum chamber would help you by lowering your boiling temp - so you don't get too many more "late maillard reactions".

You'd have to force carbonate because you would also drive off all your CO2 and kill all of your remaining yeast. If I was so inclined - I'd probably micro filter all the yeast out first. But I would never be inclined...

Finally, you would also have to make some sort of sacrifice to the beer gods for ruining perfectly good beer....


Mylo

[bub]

You could try to make a Barley and Hops tea (try not to extract sugars) and force carb it... but otherwise... No.
BUB

[damon1212]

I think I'll just brew the Best Bitter I planned, and bring two Cornies. I'll just piss into the second one and carbonate it and tell them it's a non-alcoholic macro-brew clone. They will never know the difference.

[Brew Engineer]

You could try to make a Barley and Hops tea (try not to extract sugars) and force carb it... but otherwise... No.
BUB

Could you do anything with steeping grains, but no extract? Using grains that won't self convert? I cant imagine it would have much flavor, but you could force carb, and it might taste like macro NA near beer???

Ah, you're probably better off just telling her the bitter is NA. She'll never know the difference!

[Lars]

Step 1 = go to local grocery
Step 2 = buy 2 or 3 cases of various NA "beer"
Step 3 = empty NA "beer" into corny keg
Step 4 = Serve
Optional Step 5 = claim as your own concoction.

[chrishw]

I read something about this recently- perhaps one of the recent BYO or something... I couldn't find it but google came up with this-

http://www.byo.com/feature/66.html

[DannyW]

Pick a low alcohol style like Ordinary bitter. That way lack of alcohol won't affect the flavor too much. Calculate your base malt to give you an OG of less than 1.020 but keep the specialty malts the same. Refigure the hops to match the lower OG. Brew as normal, but watch for tannins from oversparging. This might even be a better project for extract + steeping grains.

When you pitch, oxygenate the heck out of it and underpitch on purpose - maybe a half or 1/3 of a tube. Oxygenate or aerate or at least rouse every 2 hours for 10 hours. After 12-18 hours chill to 30F, sterile filter into a keg, carbonate, and serve.

The oxygen should keep the yeast in growth phase rather than in alcohol producing phase. That will hopefully give you flavors that make it taste more like beer and less like barley juice. You might even find great hop aroma from this since there isn't much CO2 driving it off. The yeast in growth phase will turn some of those sugars into more yeast, so your OG should drop from say 1.018 to 1.012. Hmm, if the yeast is just creating yeast mass, does a SG drop really equate to ABV? I don't know. Anyway, even if they made that much alcohol it would only be 0.8% ABV. Is that close enough?