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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Making alcohol-free or low-alcohol beer that tastes good is actually really hard and is still actively being researched. Because of reasons, it’s even harder at homebrew scale.

    The main methods are:

    • biological method, aka arrested fermentation: low OG wort, ferment only briefly, then chill down hard to stop fermentation. Similar to what @[email protected] described. You can further reduce the amount of alcohol produced by selecting a maltose-negative yeast, such as Saccharomycodes ludwigii or a maltose-negative Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain, such as Lallemand LalBrew LoNa, which has only been released recently.
    • physical method, aka dealcoholization: brew a normal strength wort, let it finish fermenting, then remove the alcohol through vacuum distillation or non-porous membrane distillation.

    Each of the methods have their drawbacks. If you use a maltose-negative strain, you need to be able to pasteurize your beer, otherwise infections are inevitable. This is the reason why LalBrew LoNa is currently not sold to home brewers, as Lallemand does not think that home brewers will be able to reliable pasteurize and use the yeast correctly. The beer will also taste worty and sweeter than regular beer. Dealcoholization on the other hand is basically impossible to do at home. It also leaves behind a thin-tasting beer with unsatisfactory mouthfeel. Recent research has shown that the best tasting non-alcohol/low-alcohol beer can be produced by blending two beers made with these two methods.




  • Have you checked what’s even available to you? In practice, you will be limited by which hop rhizomes are even sold in the Swedish market.

    Here in Germany, I could buy Cascade, Centennial, Comet, Ariana, Callista, Tango, Chinook, Polaris (all of these are probably interesting enough for IPAs and Pale Ales), all the typical German varieties, both landrace and older breeds, and some English ones as well.


  • What I meant was ClarityFerm/Brewers Clarex, it’s an enzyme preparation used on the cold side. It was originally designed to remove haze and produce clearer beers, but was found to also reduce gluten content to below detectable thresholds. It’s what commercial breweries often use. In some countries, beer produced that way can only be advertised as “gluten-reduced”, not “gluten-free”, though. In terms of ease of application, it seems to be the way to go if you don’t have easy access to malt of gluten-free grains. But alas, since I’m not a celiac myself, and testing is too expensive, I won’t put the burden on an actual celiac how well this works in my setup.


  • It would be interesting to know the process and ingredients you used. Since you‘re presumably only brewing gluten-free, I guess you also don‘t have to worry about cross-contamination?

    I once looked into going the gluten-reduced route (where enzymes destroy the gluten proteins below the detectable threshold) as an option to brew beer for a cousin‘s celiac boyfriend, but getting beer lab-tested for gluten content is just too expensive on a homebrew scale.