Low Alcohol and Alcohol Free Beer with Charlie Bamforth – BeerSmith Podcast #313
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Dr. Charlie Bamforth joins me this week to discuss low alcohol and alcohol-free beers. This is Beersmith Podcast number 313.

This is the Beersmith Home Brewing Show, where brewing great beer is our passion. If you want to take your brewing to the next level, visit beersmith.com, where you can download a trial version of our Beersmith software, subscribe to the newsletter, and get dozens of free articles on home brewing. And now, your host and the author of Home Brewing with Beersmith, Brad Smith.

This is Beersmith Podcast number 313 and it's early November 2024. Dr. Charlie Bamforth joins me this week to discuss low alcohol and alcohol-free beers. Thank you to this week's sponsors, Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They've recently launched a new experience called Craft Spirits and Distilling.

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Today on the show, my guest is Dr. Charlie Bamforth, Professor Emeritus of Malting and Brewing Science at the University of California at Davis. Charlie specializes in the study of wholesomeness of beer, including beer perception, polyphenols, foam stability, oxidation, and flavor stability. Charlie, it's great to have you back on the show. How are you doing today?

I'm fine. It's always nice to be with you. I've been doing a lot of these now over the years. Yeah, I think you've been on probably the most of any guest. We're pretty close to it. Oh, well, there you go. You haven't got sick of me yet then. Yeah, let's see. I've got to do the math here. It's 14 years I think we've been doing the podcast, and you were on the first year, I believe.

All right. Well, I'm still looking young and healthy, I'm sure. You are. Yes, you definitely are. So, I mean, how are things going? What projects have you been working on? Last time I spoke to you, you were actually busier, I think, in retirement than you were before you retired. Yeah, I think that's a fairly reasonable description. I'm still advising Sierra Nevada, which I'm still very proud to do. I've just signed up for

next year as well. So I'll be having my sixth year advising Sierra Nevada. Still doing teaching on the continuing and professional education at UC Davis and still writing books. I'm actually working on three books at the moment and a fourth that I'm editing. So yeah. Do you have a rough count of how many books you've written on beer so far? No.

No, you have no idea. It's somewhere between 20 and 30, something like that. And then one on soccer goalkeeping, if I recall. A book on soccer goalkeeping and also I helped a guy write his autobiography, a famous former soccer player. So two books on football, as we, of course, should call it. And I continue to write for the Wolves Heroes website. So love it.

That's awesome. Well, it's great to have you back. Today you wanted to talk about low alcohol beer and alcohol-free beer. Yeah. So let's start with the definition of the two and how they're actually different. Well, it depends on where you are. As your listeners and observers know, I'm originally from England. And in the UK, the official definition is that something that's alcohol-free is literally less than 0.05% alcohol.

And a low alcohol product is less than 1.2% ABV. In the States, it's slightly different. So generally, an alcohol-free or low alcohol product here in the States is less than 0.5% ABV. So it really does depend on where you are. Back in the day, when I was with Bass, we used to export our alcohol-free beer to Saudi Arabia.

And it most definitely had to be less than 0.05% ABV there. And we like to point out to them that actually there was more alcohol in orange juice than there was in our product. So these products have been around for a long time. And of course...

There's a big surge in them now. There's a lot of interest in alcohol-free, low-alcohol products, and it's one of the few growth areas right now in the world of beer.

Yeah, I remember at one time I think it was Old Duels was like one of the only brands I can recall, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now I think there's quite a number of them out there. And there's even some that are basically alcohol-free from what I understand. There are. It depends on how you make it. Certainly if you are carrying out any sort of fermentation, and we'll get into this, then there's inevitably going to be some alcohol produced.

But, you know, we used to produce our alcohol-free product by stripping out the alcohol, and then you can really go right down to zero. But also, you know, you could package just wort, basically, and pre-fermented wort, and then it's alcohol-free. The challenge would be the flavor. I guess we'll get into all of those things.

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of different ways to make a low-alcohol beer. Let's start with some of the older options. One of the oldest, as you mentioned, is you kind of make a regular beer and then you take the alcohol out. So how's that done? Yeah, that's what we used to do at Bass with our product Barbican. And basically, we had our mainstream lager, which in the UK and England was Carling,

And we basically put it through a vacuum stripper operation. So fairly low temperature from memory was in the mid 30 degrees Celsius and a vacuum. So you basically strip off all the ethanol and you can get down to, you know, essentially none left.

Of course, the challenge then is you also strip off all of the volatiles, so all of the esters and the alcohols, the other types of alcohol and sulfur-containing substances and so on. So you're basically stripping away everything that is going to come off in a vacuum. The other way of doing it is basically using a membrane technology, essentially reverse osmosis.

So you're basically pushing out the alcohol. And in that approach, you stand a better chance of keeping hold of or keeping some of the flavor active materials that are in there.

So it's either the thermal or the membrane approaches. And I actually, you know, there are obviously a number of products in the marketplace now internationally, and I'm pretty sure some of those are made using these physical approaches.

And the challenge that we had with our product at Bass was putting back that flavor. And so the research that we did was in terms of coming up with a mix of volatile materials that could put back the character that you would expect to have in a beer.

You know, people say, well, don't you just add them back in the proportion that they were there in the original beer? And the answer is no, because the ethanol itself, the alcohol influences the balance of those flavor materials.

So you might have a certain level of something like isoamyl acetate. Well, if it's isoamyl acetate at a certain level in a 4% ABV lager or it's diacetyl at that level in a 0% product, it doesn't present itself in the same way. It doesn't volatilize to the same extent. Alcohol tends to keep material in solution to a greater extent.

So it was a case of juggling things such that we arrived and finished up with an acceptable flavor that was clearly beer-like. But, you know, we could never sort of absolutely replace that character you get from ethanol itself, the alcohol itself. It gives you a...

Some people say sweet, some people call it burning, whatever character it's got. And it's difficult to articulate the flavor of ethanol, but whatever it is, if you don't have it in the product, then there is something missing. Now, we actually had two versions, Brad, of Barbican. We had what we call the international version, which was the

the stuff we used to sell into places like Saudi Arabia and Japan, which is the original formulation. But we also came up with a domestic variant that was sold in the UK. And I was the prime mover for changing that flavor. And I actually went to Germany and spoke with a hop supply company there.

And what we used to do for the domestic version of the barbecue was basically put in hop aroma. And we made a very hoppy product, far hoppier than anything else in the Bass stable. And so there were these hop essences that we used.

And it gave, you know, people said, oh, that smells like a beer. It smells hoppy, you know. But, you know, it may have been a little bit too robust. I'm not sure. But to me, it was preferable to the sort of rather more subtle, volatile mix that we came up with for the export version. But for this type of product,

where you're stripping alcohol out, then really all the effort needs to go into, well, how do we assure a flavor quality that is perceptible as, well, okay, that is beer-like.

But it's very hard to replace ethanol. Yeah. So I had a quick question. So you obviously can't replace the ethanol flavors completely or their aromatics from the ethanol. But can I, you know, we've got all these new hop products out now, even at the homebrew level, I can get hop aromatics and hop oils and so on that I can add back after the beer is finished. Is this something I could do with a homemade non-alcoholic beer? Yes. Yeah.

And as I said, with the domestic version of the Barbican, that's basically the character we made it in on. We made it in on hop aroma as being something that is recognizably to do with beer.

You know, to me, somebody who is picking up and sampling alcohol-free beers, low-alcohol beers, they're looking for evidence that it is, it's got beer credentials, as a marketing person might say. It's got beer credentials. It doesn't have the alcohol, but they're going to be critically looking at other things. You know, obviously, I'm going to use the word foam, and I had this conversation just

about an hour ago here in Chico, that if people are looking at an alcohol-free product, they're being hypercritical. They're going to be looking at the appearance and the flavor, and they're going to say, do those meet the standard as beers? And so those are very important. But when it comes to the flavor, it obviously has got to be something that they say, yeah, that's beer-y. That is beer-like. That is something I expect to see

in a beer. And hops, obviously, is one very useful material which is available in various products and materials you can use to introduce hop character.

Are there any other tricks you can use? I mean, obviously you're going to lose most of those aromatic comp oils when you boil off the alcohol. But are you losing other aromatics as well from the malt? Yeah, well, anything that's volatile. If you're doing this vacuum stripping operation,

anything that is volatile is going to be removed. Obviously, anything that's non-volatile, so obviously things like bitterness and the materials that contribute to the body of the product, those are not going to be lost. But anything that's volatile is going to be lost. I remember, I won't name the company, but I was talking to one international brewing company, and in their alcohol-free beer, they actually put a little bit of the skunky, light-struck character in there.

arguing that, well, you know, that's something else that people are used to when they're drinking many beers. And they're drinking it in a sunny garden somewhere in Florida or somewhere like that. And of course, it's picking up this light-struck character.

And so by putting that into the alcohol-free beer, they're lending some of that authenticity and introducing a character that people say, yeah, well, I get that in beer. It's, you know, that's good. It's there. And so this is a beer. But the alcohol itself...

It's hard to replace that. If I could segue slightly, Brad, at Bass, we had a fairly active new product development program. And we were not only making alcohol-free beer, we were also making alcohol-free wine. It was actually called Iceberg, E-I-S-B-E-R-G. And it is interesting that our wine people, the wine division, hated the Iceberg brand.

They said it's awful. It's just not like a wine at all. Whereas us on the beer side, we thought it's really very good. And we thought the beer was pretty damned awful. But the wine guys thought, well, the beer's pretty good. So there's a tremendous loyalty to your particular preference. But we also tried making alcohol-free spirits.

Interesting. And these, I was at a presentation from a former student of mine in Minneapolis recently, and she works for a very large brewing company, a drinks company, and they're making alcohol-free spirits. But when we experimented with it, the way we put that sort of fire in there was literally with chili, chili essences.

and replacing the power of the alcohol with the fire from spice, basically. So, you know, that is... It's all to do with the chemistry set there in the new product development teams and how can they juggle the flavors if you're going to take that physical approach, which is different, obviously, from doing...

Some of the other approaches, yeah. The biological approach. Yeah. Now, the other thing... Go ahead. Sorry. No, no, no. No, go ahead. I'm sorry. Well, the other thing we did at Bass was come up with a...

Not alcohol-free product, but a low alcohol product. And I personally am a big fan of these lower alcohol products. And the way we did it was this. As I've said, what we used to do was to take our regular lager, Carling, or in Scotland it was Tennant's, and de-alcoholize it to produce the barbecued.

But we experimented by blending the two. So, you know, the Carling, the tenants were 4% ABV, remembering that ABVs for tax reasons are lower in the UK than they are over here in the States.

So we blended them. So we blended 50-50, 50% Barbican, 50% lager. So we got 2% product. Then we did 25% Barbican, 75% Carling. So we got a 3% product. And we did 75% Barbican, 25% Carling or tenants. And so we got a 1% product.

Now, the 3% product was amazing. You could argue that it wasn't hugely different from the 4% product. The 50% product was pretty damn good, really very, very good.

But of course, we went with the 1% ABV product for the simple reason that it wasn't taxed. So it was less than 1.2%. Therefore, it met the official criterion of low alcohol and it wasn't taxed. And it wasn't as good as the 2% product, which in turn was not quite as good as the 3% product.

But this is one way of producing lower alcohol products that have got all the body in there and a lot of the flavor as well. So if you take, for example, that 2% product, so it was a 50-50 split between the two, you've got quite a lot of ethanol still. So you've got that character.

and the balance of volatiles is still pretty good. And so I'm a big fan of these things. Of course, the problem in...

in the United States is that if there's alcohol there, it's taxed and it's at a flat rate. So if you've got a choice between 6% and 5% and 4% and 3%, all the same price range, then you're not going to go for a 2% product if you can get the bigger bang for your buck. So it's hard to go in this direction. But

But I do think, you know, personally, my personal preference is to look at products that are in that range. So they're lower in alcohol, but they've still got all of those beer characteristics. The complexity of the character. Yeah, without trying to put them back in. Yeah. So I'm a big fan of those.

Charlie, could you go over the membrane osmosis thing? Because it's something, you know, I think most of us can imagine the vacuum distillation where you heat up the beer and basically boil off the alcohol. But can you walk through how the membrane system works? Yeah, basically, reverse osmosis is the opposite of osmosis. Most of us at school will know what osmosis is. That is where water passes from a dilute solution into a concentrated solution until you equalize the concentrations.

So with reverse osmosis, you're pushing out the materials. And so you're taking away and pushing out things like ethanol and leaving other things behind. Now, again, you're not going to get...

the same flavor loss that you would get in a vacuum process. So that's basically it. But I, Brad, have no personal experience with the membrane approaches. I just know that they have been advocated. And I'm not sure that

Quite honestly, either of these lend themselves particularly to, to certainly the home brew level, you know? Um, uh, I think some of the more biological approaches are probably more appealing. Yeah, no, I agree. And, uh, why don't we talk about those next? Uh, you know, more recently, a lot of brewers have moved to the alternative, which is, uh, using a combination of techniques often true mashing and fermentation and so on to create a low alcohol beer.

Can we walk through this? Let's start off with the mash. What can you do in the mash to keep the alcohol level down? Well, there are several things you can do. The first of these, and I believe it's probably more widely used commercially than the others, is high-temperature mashing. Now, this is an approach to making low-alcohol products, not alcohol-free products.

And we've probably touched on this before, the window of opportunity when you're breaking down starch. I mean, there are two things you've got to have when you're breaking down starch in a mash. You've got to have the gelatinization of the starch. So you need things to be warm enough to gelatinize the starch so it now is in a form where it can be broken down. But you've not got to be at such a high temperature that you're killing off the enzymes that are making the fermentable sugars.

So with high temperature mashing, it's plenty high enough temperature for gelatinizing the starch, but you mash at a temperature where you kill off the beta amylase very quickly. Remembering that the main enzymes involved in breaking down the starch are alpha amylase and beta amylase. Alpha amylase is very heat tolerant. So if you mash at something like 73, 74 Celsius and

Which is well above the standard of range. Yeah. Your listeners know full well that I won't use the F word, so you can calculate the Fahrenheit value for yourselves. But 73, 74 Celsius, the alpha amylase survives, so you break down the starch to produce dextrin, but you've killed off the beta amylase, so you're not producing maltose. You're not producing fermentable carbohydrate. There'll be a little bit, a

in the time taken to kill off the beta amylase, there'll be a little bit of

fermentable carbohydrate produced, but nowhere near as much as in the conventional mashing operation. So when you go ahead and ferment that, and of course the yeast in carrying out that fermentation is going to clean up the wort and it's going to, all the good things that yeast does, gets rid of aldehydes and all the stuff that you probably don't want in a flavor product, an alcohol-free product, a low alcohol product, but you've got much less alcohol.

I know Whitbread years ago used to have a beer in the UK called White Label, and that was made by high-temperature mashing. And from memory, it was around 1% ABV. Now, the other extreme is, well, don't do high-temperature mashing, do low-temperature mashing. So if you mash at temperatures below gelatinization temperature,

then you keep all the enzymes, but you don't have any, well, very little starch that's able to be broken down into fermentable carbohydrate. So, you know, the two extremes are high-temperature mashing and low-temperature mashing. The third opportunity is really the most historically significant one, and that is to remash the spent grains.

As any brewing historian knows, long before the days of tea and coffee, ale was the drink morning, noon, and night. And there was a regular beer, the strong beer, which the adults consumed. And then there was the small beer.

which was much lower in alcohol. That's what the kids drank. And, you know, there's certain arguments about how this was done, but one way was to take the spent grains from the first mash and remash them.

And so you mash them a second time and you produce a product with less fermentable carbohydrate. Okay, it goes through the boiling stage, so it's nice and safe. But when it's fermented, you're going to produce a lower alcohol product. So I assume that's similar to party guile brewing, the same thing, right? Yes, the same sort of approach. So that's the small beer approach. Okay.

And then there are barleys and therefore malts that you can get that don't have beta amylase in them. So they've been bred not to have beta amylase.

So I'm not sure how widely these are available, but I haven't looked through a catalog recently. But there are barleys that lack beta amylase. So obviously when those malts are mashed, then they're going to give you much lower fermentability. So a modified mashing approach is something that basically on any scale anybody could do.

And again, you're not going to be producing alcohol-free products, but certainly low alcohol products. Now, what does that do to the character of the beer? Do I end up with a much richer malty finish because I'm working at these really high temperatures? You're certainly going to get retained malty character products.

And so you are probably going to retain some greater degree of worty character. But again, because you're going to go through, these are going to be fermented using regular yeast, then although the yeast is not going to be able to have such an extensive fermentation and produce, so it's producing a lot less alcohol, nonetheless, it is still going to be absorbing yeast

aldehydes and things that give sort of the more unpleasant characteristics. Because yeast is a great friend of brewers. It's great at mopping up aldehydes. It takes aldehydes and makes alcohols. And so the advantage of this sort of approach is that you are going to be going through an ensuing fermentation.

At one extreme, back in the day, certainly, I'm not going to name names, but there certainly were alcohol-free products that were extremely worty. Basically, these were packaged wort, which was not cleaned up.

And then you'd really do get a wordy character. Having said which, you know, when people tasted them, they said, oh, it smells like a brewery, which it did smell like a brewery. It may not smell like a beer, but smell like a brewery. So it had a degree of authenticity to it. But, you know, people, you know, all responsible brewers should taste the word, of course, but few of them actually want pint after pint of word.

Do I need to adjust my starting gravity? Because I assume you're going to finish much higher than you normally would, right? Yeah. So you play tunes, it's experimentation. And until you arrive at something, you say, okay, that is acceptable to me. I'm proud to put my name to that and give it to your friends.

And of course, the next phase is that you can use a variety of techniques during fermentation. Can you walk through some of these? There's actually several of them, and there's also all these new yeasts you can use. Yeah, there are. So I think the thing that most people are enthusiastic about these days are alternative yeasts. But as I've said, yeast is a great friend. So you can...

take advantage of exposing your wort to yeast. You could start a fermentation and then stop it once before you've got too much alcohol. So the arrested fermentation approach. So you take a regular wort and then expose it to yeast. And once you've decided there's a regular amount of alcohol in there, then chill it down, get the yeast off by whatever means you can as soon as possible.

So the arrested fermentation approach. Some people advocate for a very low temperature fermentation. So again, you're slowing everything down. You're exposing the wort to the yeast, and the yeast is doing all the good things. But at a low temperature, things are going more slowly, including the production of alcohol. And again, you obviously need to separate off the yeast from the liquid before you go too far.

But, you know, the advocate these days for many people would be alternative yeast. Now, there are different yeast strains that don't produce alcohol, like Saccharomycodes ludwigii. But there are also commercial yeast companies that have got modified versions of

of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that do not produce ethanol. They lack the gene genomics. I've heard the term like maltose negative thrown out, and I think there's other ones that are maltose negative, and I can't remember another.

Dextrose negative or something like that. Well, yeah, dextrose, of course, glucose. But I mean, the main sugar in most words is going to be maltose. There's going to be some glucose there.

some multi-triose possibly. I assume, yeah, it was multi-triose then. So I assume maltose negative means it probably does not ferment maltose very well, right? Precisely. So what it's, regular yeast, of course, to use, well, if you give yeast glucose, it can just straightaway enter into the yeast cell and be used. And so if you give yeast a mixture of sugars, it will use glucose or fructose first.

But to use the maltose, it needs a transport protein in its membrane to actually ship the

the maltose into the cell and then it needs to produce the enzyme, the glucoamylase or glucosidase rather, to actually split the maltose into glucose so you can use it. So chances are that these strains, it's not so much the transport protein they won't have, it will be, they've no longer got, they've got knocked out that glucosidase gene, the enzyme to break the maltose

into glucose. So I'm assuming that's what it is. Again, I'm not on the inside in that particular area. But the bottom line is they no longer use maltose or maltotriols. Now, there may be a little bit of alcohol produced by these strains. I think there probably is. So you've got to be mindful of that.

But it certainly is, you know, to use an alternative yeast, assuming it does all the other good things that yeast does in terms of mopping up undesirable flavors and so on, then obviously there's a lot to be said for using these things. And it may be that you have a mixture of these technologies. So it may be that you strive to combine something like high-temperature mashing

with the use of a modified yeast strain that doesn't produce alcohol. And then, you know, all things are possible to arrive at a unique product at the end of the day. So I'm not personally at Sierra Nevada, I've not had any direct involvement at all in the excellent low alcohol products that are being produced by Sierra Nevada. But

But they very much are using different yeast strains. That's the approach. There is no stripping off of alcohol involved in the production of those beers. Yeah, I mean, I've had some of these low-alcohol commercial beers, and they are excellent. And the ones made with the yeast, I should say. Yeah, yeah. You know, they have most of the character of a good beer, and they taste good, you know. Yeah. You know, they are...

You're never going to get an alcohol-free or very low alcohol product

and present it blind alongside a 5%, 6% ABV product and say, people get confused. I think they'll always be able to pick out the alcohol-free one. But they've come a long way. I mean, when I was telling my stories about Barbican and Tenants LA, you know, we're talking the mid-'80s, mid-1980s. So there's a lot of beer being brewed since then.

And these days, alcohol-free beers are much more credible and creditable than they were then. But, you know, what I used to do, Brad, when I was, you know, I was a sportsman, hard to imagine these days. But, you know, when I played a lot of cricket and I'd finished playing cricket and, of course, a big social component to that going into the bar afterwards, but I wanted to drive home.

and, um, uh, and, and stay, uh, sensible. Uh, I used to literally take alcohol free beer and the regular beer. And I used to mix them 50, 50 in a, in a glass, uh, in the pub or, uh, you know, the, the, the bartender would, would pull a half pint of beer in a pint glass and I would top it up with the barbecue. And that, that was, that was, uh, for me, an acceptable way to, uh,

to have my pint, but also keep the alcohol level down. And, you know, the regular beer provided the oomph that I wanted, and the alcohol-free product, any deficiencies in there were masked by the regular product. So...

So there's all sorts of ways of consuming these. But, yeah, it is a fact that things are much better these days. These products are much, much better than they were. Now, is it easier to make, for example, a dark beer that's going to hide some of those flaws than a lighter beer? Yeah, I would say so. You know, again, this comes back to those hoppy notes.

If you, it's got, everything's got to be in balance. And if you, if you've got a thin, thin product and an alcohol free product is by lacking the alcohol, it is lacking a certain oomph on the, on the, on the palate. You know, you can overdo those hops.

and if you've got a relatively thin product with a big hoppy nose, it doesn't really work. But if you've got a lot of, say, roasted character in there and a lot of body there and also got a nice hoppy node on top, then yeah, I would say that's,

probably going to come up with for my palate a more acceptable opportunity than would be a relatively paler lighter character well uh on that along those lines the biggest challenge of course in creating a low alcohol beer is achieving that proper balance and as you know as you mentioned you have to adjust the gravity levels you have to adjust the hop levels uh

as well as trying to maintain as much of the flavor as you can. What are some of the common flaws we see in low alcohol beers and what can be done about them? Well, I've used the word worty before. And if you have basically something that is that much closer to wort,

then you do get that sort of raw character that is not particularly pleasant and does not exactly lend itself to drinkability. So again, exposure to yeast, to the extent you're able, is going to clean that up. Or indeed, you don't get the same degree of worty character in a vacuum-stripped product.

But if you're not careful, you can lead to some some cucked character in there as well. So so the worthiness is one feature I've mentioned already, you know, but if you are going to use stripping techniques, then you are going to be removing those characteristics and you've got to find a way of bringing them back.

There is a risk, certainly with that physical approach, of introducing aged character into a product. So you've obviously got to be very mindful of oxygen levels and so on. But again, I think for most of your listeners, they're not really going to be considering a vacuum stripping approach. And again, it's...

Lending authenticity. So I do believe that beer drinkers, and they know what they like, and they know what the flavor of beer is in their expectation. They're going to be expecting to see in a low or alcohol-free product characteristics that they say, yeah, I recognize that. That is what I would expect to see in a beer product.

And I've given you examples of that with the hop character or even the MBT, the light-struck character. So these sorts of things. Of course, some people would say, Jolly, I think you're underestimating the sophistication of the drinker. And they might be prepared to accept flavors that they don't.

They don't expect them to be like they would have in a regular pale ale or a Pilsner or something. They know it's going to be different, but they're looking for something which is pleasing and pleasant, desirable. And it's just a pleasant drink.

And, you know, are you overplaying the story? Are you saying, you mean too strong, insisting that it should be beer-like? Should it be a pleasant drink? Okay, it looks like a beer, has the characteristics, the credentials of a beer. It's got a nice foam on it. But they're prepared to accept a different flavor for the simple joy of having a longer drink that is alcohol-free.

And, you know, the same sort of argument people make perhaps for some of the gluten-free beers. You make a beer out of 100% sorghum or buckwheat or millet or something like that, then no, it doesn't taste like a beer, a regular pale ale or a pilsner or stout or whatever, but it's pleasing and it's okay and it looks like a beer and it comes in a vessel that's...

shaped like a beer bottle, and it's labeled beer, but it's alcohol-free. So they say, okay, well, it's going to taste different, and is that okay? So I'm, you know, I'm drifting into philosophy now, and I'm certainly not a sales and marketing guy. But you are a philosopher. We all know that, Chuck.

At the end of the day, it's going to be what sells. A doctor of philosophy, if I recall, right? Well, yeah. Yeah.

My wife's father used to say I was educated to the height of ignorance. But, you know, so what we'll sell is what people are prepared to buy and have repeat purchases of. And it may be that I'm overplaying the sort of the being close to how regular beer tastes. But it's got, it's at the very least,

in my opinion, it's got to look like a beer. Well, I think we both agree they're getting closer and closer as time goes on, which is a good thing. They are.

They are. But I still maintain that. I mean, I'll be perfectly frank. And I've got a lot of excellent friends in the brewing industry and I don't want to upset anybody. But psychologically, Brad, I'm not going to buy alcohol free beer regularly. It's you know, I like my I like my beers as I've grown to know and love them.

And if I don't want alcohol, I, I, I'd simply won't drink alcohol. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll drink something else. Um, but of course people, there are many people and a growing segment of people who don't want to drink alcohol, but they, they do like to, to have something that is, is, is to their mind beer.

And we should be making sure we give them the best possible products. And as we have said, you and I, several times today, they are getting much better. Yeah.

What techniques do you recommend for somebody to actually try at home? What kinds of these things can I do at home easily? Well, if I was, as I've said before, I've never been a home brewer. But the easiest, easy, well, relatively easiest things to play around with, short of the alternative yeast strains, would be those modified mashing techniques. And

I would argue probably the most logical of those is the high temperature mashing and blending as well. Blending

products to arrive at an intermediary alcohol concentration. I did want to mention, when we talk about alternative yeast, they are available now at the homebrew level. There's a number of yeast providers that sell these, so that's an option too. It certainly is. And

You know, I would certainly embrace that as well. But short of that, if you wanted to be loyal to your Saccharomyces, then my first venture would be with high-temperature mashing. Well, Charlie, I appreciate you coming on. I wanted to get your closing thoughts before we go, though.

Yeah, just the one thing that we haven't touched upon is the hygiene situation and the fact that alcohol-free beer and lower alcohol products to an extent, you know, they are more susceptible to spoilage with pathogenic organisms. One of the things that really scares me is alcohol-free beer on draft, on tap, right?

I do hope people are looking after it. So, you know, one of the great benefits of ethanol, of which there are several, but one of the great ones is it prevents pathogens from growing in the beer. I didn't realize this, but you can't actually grow pathogens in beer if it's of proper strength, right? Right. They may survive, but they won't thrive. But if you've got a

alcohol-free beer and I particularly worry about people putting it onto draft dispense, then that worries me. So closing thoughts basically are, you know, it's a fascinating area.

I'm sure that in these days when a distressingly large number of younger people are not drinking alcohol, here is an opportunity for commercial brewers to make sure they keep in business by presenting the opportunity to have alcohol-free or lower alcohol products. So to that extent, it's an extremely good thing

But I hope at the end of the day, some of the projections are wrong. I was at a meeting in Milan of the Bironomics Society during the summer. The Bironomics Society is an organization dedicated to the economics of brewing.

And there was a presentation. They were talking about the projected growth of alcohol-free and low-alcohol products. And it's, I mean, it's astronomic growth. If you carry out the trajectory, you know, in 10 years' time, it will be the majority of the beer. But they said, you know, it's not going to happen that way. It won't be like that. It will tail off.

It's at what level it tails off. Whereas, you know, the previous boon of alcohol-free products in, say, the 80s, it certainly tailed off and then dwindled. But it's coming back again. So, you know, I don't know what the current projection is. But, you know, I would say maybe in 10 years' time, it may be 10%, 20% of the total market.

And that is a part of the market that a lot of brewers want to be. Well, I mean, 20% is almost what the craft beer market is now. So, I mean, that's still a huge percentage, right? It certainly is. And, you know, there are some pretty well-known companies that are dedicated to alcohol-free beer. I believe Athletic is one of them. One of my former master's students is a big player there. So, a lot of interest in the area. Yeah.

And, you know, it'd be interesting to see where the technology goes. But at the end of the day, flavor-wise, there's a big difference between 0% alcohol and 4% or 5% alcohol. It makes a difference. Well, Charlie, I'd like to thank you for coming on the show again. Really appreciate you being here. Always a pleasure. It's nice to talk to you.

Today, my guest is Dr. Charlie Bamforth, Professor Emeritus of Malting and Brewing Science at the University of California at Davis. Thank you again, Charlie. Thank you.

A big thank you to Charlie Bamforth for joining me this week. Thanks also to Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They've recently launched an all-new experience called Craft Spirits and Distilling. If you make or love spirits, check out spiritsanddistilling.com for recipes, how-to videos, their Spirits and Distilling podcast, and much more. Again, that new site is spiritsanddistilling.com.

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