What Exactly Is In Non-Alcoholic Beer & How Is It Made?

Whether you've completely eradicated alcohol from your life, or you just want to cut back, non-alcoholic beer is a great way to enjoy a cold brew but without the harmful substance that gets you buzzed. Non-alcoholic beer has come a long way since O'Doul's was pretty much the only one on the market. (The fact that this list of top non-alcoholic beers to try even exists is indicative of this growth.) However, with breweries big and small ramping up production, you might be wondering what is actually in non-alcoholic beer. What's more, how do producers remove the alcohol from it?

"At least in the United States, non-alcoholic (N/A) beer is beer that has been brewed so that the final alcohol by volume (ABV) is less than 0.5%," said Brandon Pierce, operations manager for Brickyard Hollow Brewing Co., with whom Food Republic had the pleasure of speaking. N/A beer, he revealed, goes through the exact same creation process that regular beer does, until towards the end of production when a variety of methods are employed to limit or remove the alcohol. There are various ways of removing the alcohol, including controlled fermentation and dealcoholization. However, neither change the building blocks of N/A beer which are, as with normal beer, malt, hops, yeast, and water.

Perhaps the most widely used method for limiting the alcohol content in non-alcoholic beer is called controlled or arrested fermentation. "Brewers can 'arrest' fermentation by closely regulating temperature," Brandon Pierce explained. "Most ale yeast has an optimal fermentation range of around 70 degrees Fahrenheit." Pierce went on to say that, when "the combination of water and sugars extracted from the malt," called the wort are not allowed to reach that temperature, the yeast doesn't produce alcohol. Companies like Good Time Brewing use this method to produce N/A beers.

The other common method of making N/A beer is called dealcoholization. "This process involves adding water or steam to the finished product and then boiling it," said Pierce. "The alcohol releases into a vapor (it has a lower evaporation point than water) and is collected and removed." There are three ways that dealcoholization can be achieved: Steam distillation, which Pierce just described; reverse osmosis, a purification process that separates the alcohol from the beer; and vacuum distillation, which is like steam distillation but under lower pressure. 

There are two other, less commonly used, methods for making non-alcoholic beer. The first is dilution. As Brandon Pierce explained, this process means that the beer is diluted with water until the required ABV is met. "This doesn't stress the beer as much," Pierce said, "but in order to create an acceptable substitute for an otherwise flavorful beer (e.g. IPA), brewers need to make sure they load up the wort with sugars and flavors before it's fermented." He went on to say that if you were to dilute a regular beer recipe into a N/A version, there would be a lot lost in terms of its unique characteristics (if ever hops were important to beer, it'd be now).

Another less commonly used method is to entirely remove the ingredient that ferments the beer: yeast. "You can 'brew' without yeast," Pierce affirmed, "but you'll need to add enzymes and other additives that may or may not negatively affect the final product." This is called simulated fermentation, and the additives are used to replicate not only flavor, but texture. This means the finished product tastes like beer, feels like it in your mouth, and even pours like regular beer (provided you pour the beer correctly).