Best Practices for brewing Low Alcohol/Non-Alcoholic Beers, part 1

A Global Trend

The beer industry, in particular the craft beer segment, has been in continuous expansion for the past few decades. Many trends and styles appeared and disappeared over this period, but one segment keeps gaining momentum: Non-Alcoholic and Low Alcohol Beers (NAB/LAB).

For craft brewers, producing low-ABV beers is an opportunity to extend their portfolio and appeal to a new generation of beer drinkers, which is shifting towards healthier eating and drinking habits with reduced calories and alcohol consumption. These beers also enable easier compliance with harsher government policies on driving under alcohol influence. This growing global market is expected to reach $23 Billion in 2025 [1].
 

The Biological Approach

Traditional NAB/LAB is associated with a lack of flavor and aroma with reduced consumer acceptance. Large breweries produce the vast majority of the low-ABV beers in the market through expensive thermal and mechanical de-alcoholization methods to remove ethanol from normal-strength beers while trying to preserve the taste. The requirement for specialized and costly equipment puts these approaches outside the reach of most craft breweries.

Alternatively, biological methods focus on the restricted ethanol production during fermentation by the yeast cells. The main strategies to limit ethanol production include:

• Low fermentability wort;
• Lower fermentation temperatures;
• Limited brewer’s yeast contact time;
• Maltose-intolerant Saccharomyces;
• Non-conventional yeast species.

The main advantage of such biological techniques is the possibility of direct implementation with little to no investments in additional equipment. More often than not, several of these strategies are used simultaneously to produce NAB/LAB (Fig. 1).

Wort Production