Quite a while ago a friend asked me if I could mention how non-alcoholic beer and wine is made. I thought about doing that as part of another newsletter, but after a bit of research have decided it is worth a newsletter to itself. It might seem odd that a newsletter named after the Roman god of wine and intoxication, would put thought into non-alcoholic drinks, but then I am not suggesting that they should fully replace alcoholic drinks. Also, it is worth noting that the Romans viewed Bacchus as one of the most dangerous gods, and how a few drinks and fun can easily become too many and lead to chaos.
Good non-alcoholic drinks are a very useful drink to have around when you are not drinking, be it for health reasons or because you are driving, and as wine and beer are so intwined into our culture it often feels better to have a non-alcoholic version of one rather than another soft drink.
What is somewhat confusing is that in the UK a drink has to have an abv. of 0.05% or lower to count as alcohol free, whereas the EU accepts anything under 0.5%. Oh, and the UK is fine with 0.5% for drinks imported from the EU. This might seem a bit odd and 0.5% might sound like it is notably alcoholic, which it is, but no more so than many fruit juices. For the purposes of this newsletter, I will follow the EU system of calling 0.5% or lower alcohol free as studies have shown that it would be almost impossible to make any measurable change to a person’s blood alcohol, no matter how much 0.5% stuff they drink.
Many non-alcoholic versions of wine, beer, and other fermented drinks are made by starting with an alcoholic version, so it is worth quickly going over how beer and wine is made (other things like cider are made in a similar way to wine).
The first step of any fermented drink is to make a liquid that is high in sugar. For wine this is often just a case of extracting the juice from grapes (though as I previously discussed sugar is also often added). Beer is a little bit more complicated as the grains have to be malted (which uses their natural enzymes to turn starch into sugar) and then crushed and steeped in water to extract the sugar, and produce a sugar rich liquid called wort. Also, beer has flavour from hops (and sometimes other things) so the wort will have hops steep into it, before fermentation can happen.
Then fermentation can happen, and is most commonly done by adding a specific strain of yeast, which is known to create the right flavours (for yeast is not perfect and so will ferment sugar into things other then ethanol) and also will stop fermenting at the right point, for you would not want the finished drink to have zero sugar in.
For both beer and wine, the fermentation process creates and alters flavour, and as it progresses the alcohol will interact with other compounds and further alter the flavour and mouthfeel of the drink. Also note that this is a simplification as wine and some beers and ciders can rely on secondary fermentations for flavour, such as malolactic fermentation in white wine. For these assume that all fermentations have finished before the steps outlined below.
Beer:
There are four main ways to make non-alcoholic beer, dealcoholisation, dilution, limited fermentation and not fermenting.
Dealcoholisation works by making beer normally and then treating the finished beer to remove the ethanol. This can be done either by distillation or reverse osmosis.
Distillation can be as simple as distilling the beer at normal pressure, and then if desired treating the distillate to remove alcohol (often by a second distillation) and adding back some of the flavour compounds that were lost. This does have issues as heating the beer can lead to the breakdown of some flavour compounds, and so to avoid this the beer is most often distilled at low pressures so a lower temperature is needed, i.e., vacuum distillation.
Reverse osmosis works by passing the beer through a very fine membrane, which is designed to only let water and ethanol through (although often some other compounds will get through), so that a concentrated beer is left that has been stripped of alcohol. This then has water added to rehydrate it, often using the water that passed through the membrane with the ethanol, which is separated by distillation.
Dilution works by making beer in the normal way but with far higher concentration of hops and malts, especially the malts used for flavour, so the resulting beer has an intensely concentrated flavour and so once diluted down to 0.5% or lower, it still tastes of beer. This can have issues for some styles as the flavour compounds produced by yeast are not as scalable as the concentration of alpha acids which give hops their bitterness.
Limited fermentation works by controlling the fermentation so that the yeast stops fermenting before the beer gets more than 0.5% alcohol. There are multiple ways to do this but the major ones are; to control the sugar so the yeast runs out of things to ferment before it can produce much alcohol; to use a specific yeast strain that will stop fermenting at a low alcohol level; and to use a normal yeast strain but to alter the environment to stop fermentation before too much alcohol is produced, and can be done by heating the wort to inhibit the yeast. All of these methods have potential downsides. Having only limited sugar in the wort can lead to a beer that feels rather thin, specific yeast strains can produce unwanted off flavours and leave too much sugar, and stopping fermentation part way can also leave too much sweetness in the finished beer. These can all also cause issues for beers that rely on flavour compounds from the yeast such as the banana flavours (esters) in many wheat beers, as the yeast does not have a chance to make much of them.
The last way of doing it is to not actually ferment the wort, and so in my eyes this is not really non-alcoholic beer, but just a very specifically flavoured barley water. But as many people do consider it to be a type of non-alcoholic beer it is worth mentioning. This is especially flawed as without yeast many of the flavours that make beer, beer, will not be present.
To sum up: all of these techniques have issues, and so a brewer will decide which method to use depending on the beer style they are making, as some issues will be more pronounced in some styles than others. Indeed, some might use a mix of techniques, such as limiting the fermentation to create a beer that is quite low in alcohol (e.g., 1.5%) and then use vacuum distillation to bring the abv down to almost zero.
Wine:
Most non-alcoholic wine starts with normal wine, and then similar vacuum distillation or reverse osmosis processes are done. It is also less common as very few wine makers will make a non-alcoholic version of their wine, whereas many large breweries will make a non-alcoholic version of at least one of their beers. It is also made harder for wine as far more wine is aged before drinking than beer is, and non-alcoholic drinks are typically made from fermented drinks that have not been significantly aged prior to processing, as some of the flavours from aging would be particularly at risk of loss in the process, and once the alcohol has been removed the drink is more prone to going off, and without ethanol many of the aging process cannot happen.
I am not so convinced that non-alcoholic wine works flavour wise, particularly as wine and beer are drunk differently. Removing the alcohol will change how the drink smells as the alcohol content of wine makes it easier for volatile flavour compounds to be released, and so a non-alcoholic drink wine will not have the same nose as the alcoholic wine it was made from. And this is supposing that the removal of alcohol has not removed any flavour compounds. Beer, is just as impacted, but as beer tends to be drunk faster, and with less thought of the aromas, than wine, for most people the change will not be as noticeable.
There is no real chance that non-alcoholic beer, wine, and cider will ever directly compete with the alcoholic versions and I do not think they ever should, but it is good to see more and more non-alcoholic drinks being made. I like to drink but sometimes cannot or choose not to and would like something good to drink. And sometimes the thing I want is a beer, for when I drink it is not just the taste and effect of a drink that is important but all the memories and social connotations of my drink.
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