As Dry January has firmly entered the consciousness, many brewers are looking to get involved in the category. It’s not easy and there are risks involved, but some companies are working to make it a bit easier for breweries of all sizes to at least experiment with recipes.
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One of the products that has come to the market recently is yeast that is specifically designed to help brew low alcohol beers. This is just one of the tools brewers can use as they mess around with the style and to help determine a more robust commitment to regularly making one.
Sean Thommen, the Area Sales Support Manager for USA (West) at Fermentis spoke with ProBrewer contributor John Holl about the yeast and the best practices. Thommen was a brewer for 16 years in multiple locations including the Pacific Northwest and in Vietnam, before moving into sales.
John Holl: What do you make of the current interest in non alcoholic beer?
Sean Thommen: It’s the fastest growing segment of beer by far. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not a fad. It’s something that’s going to grow even further it’s really going beyond the bounds of what it was before. We’re branching out of [previous reasons people might have consumed non-alcoholic beer] and we’re really getting it into regular day use.
The beer is getting better, and people are wanting to drink it more socially, more in between beers, more after beers. Regular drinkers are choosing to drink it as an option for lunch or with colleagues and friends. It’s becoming more utilitarian.
John Holl: So where does this concept of a yeast specifically for NA beers start to come into play?
Sean Thommen: The yeast is important. For making non-alcoholic beer there’s a few different ways you can make it. One is to separate the alcohol from the beer. Just make a regular beer and just and separate it. Another way is arrested fermentation. That where you basically make a beer to a point and then stop fermentation within the legal limit where you can call a beer non-alcoholic. The third way is to use a yeast specific for non-alcoholic beer.
What this yeast does, it really only ferments glucose. Wort is made up of lots of different complex sugars and simple sugars. The simple sugars are mainly glucose, and this glucose makes up about 15% of your wort. So, if the yeast can only ferment this sugar, so that means that it produces a low gravity beer, then you can produce specifically under .5% abv.
That’s useful, because with a traditional yeast, if you stop fermentation at .5%, there’s some issues there. You’re not getting a full fermentation, and there can be problematic compounds that are still left in the beer. You can be left with a beer that’s very worty and unfinished.
We call these strains “maltose negative” because they can’t ferment maltose. They’re able to ferment enough to really give the character a beer and then be done. You get a much more beer-like character from these yeasts.
There’s a lot of different strains that are out there that can do this. There are Saccharomyces strains, and then there are other non-Saccharomyces yeasts that can do this. And there’s even some bacteria out there that are being looked at as well. But our strain in particular, Safbrew LA-01 is a Saccharomyces yeast.
The “01” is first generation. That’s leaving us room to have other strains out there. With non-alcoholic beer growing, especially in the craft sector, that we want to have options in the future. I think you’ll see down the road a whole portfolio of different yeasts that can do different things.
John Holl: Let’s talk about this from the brewing perspective. Do brewers have to do anything different if they’re, if they’re using this?
Sean Thommen: In regard to our yeast, most maltose negative strains are similar in that you need to still make a low gravity beer. We’re talking about six to eight plato wort, so this will seem very light for a lot of brewers, and you’ll ferment in just a few days, really, because this yeast is just fermenting glucose, so it’ll be done very quickly.
The thing that you need to really watch out for in the brewery, specifically on the fermentation end, is that you’re leaving a lot of very fermentable sugar in your beer. In a brewhouse you have a lot of yeast floating around, yeast that’s very capable of fermenting this this residual sugar.
Cross contamination is going to be a major issue. But with the fact that this yeast ferments so quickly, so strongly, and so fast, and it doesn’t produce enough diacetyl or unwanted character that you don’t have to worry so much about the diacetyl rest. As soon as you reach your plato, crash the beer and don’t let anything else attack the sugar.
Crashing it, filtering it, pasteurizing it. Getting that process all done quickly is really going to make things very easy and safe as far as cross contamination goes.
Mashing is another technique where you can control how much of that glucose that you’re making in your wort. Mashing at higher temperatures can be a way of preventing more glucose being made.
You want to make there’s ways of building body by mashing at a much higher temperature. Mashing a little higher, getting a little more structure and texture in there can really help build some body in your in your non-alcoholic beer.
John Holl: And that brings us to pasteurization.
Sean Thommen: Let’s dive into that. Pasteurization is really our number one recommendation. It’s also the thing that prevents most small craft breweries from getting into non-alcoholic beer.
Not every brewery has a giant tunnel pasteurizer. So, it’s not going to be accessible for everyone. There’s ways to do it on a small scale – it’s kind of labor intensive – batch pasteurization, but there’s also newer companies that are coming out now because equipment companies have really seen the opportunity that’s out there in this growing segment. Companies are coming in with smaller footprint tunnel pasteurizers at lower costs. That’s making this a lot more accessible to smaller and mid-level breweries.
There are other options too. There are stabilizers that are out there right now, preservative stabilizers that can help prevent any kind of extra fermentation in the package. This is a little bit of a frontier area that people are experimenting with.
John Holl: As brewers think about dipping into this category what are early steps that you recommend, they consider before launching into brewing?
Sean Thommen: You really want to consider the fact that you are making a food product. Keep that in mind. You want to take every level of caution that you can but be optimistic, and if you’re willing to go the extra mile, on a little bit of research and careful production, you’re going to be ahead of the game.