November 2024

As part of the ongoing student internship, we produced around 200 liters of a non-alcoholic pale ale on November 6, 2024. The brew consisted of a base of Pale Ale malt, rounded off with Munich malt and Carapils. The dark Munich malt gives the beer, which will only have an original gravity of 7 °P, a mild malt character and also serves to deepen the color, while Carapils improves the foam. Mashing took place for 30 minutes at 76 °C in the BrewTools 150 Pro (malt pipe technology), whereby this time we made full use of the system's capacity.
We moved the complete saccharification to the lautering phase, and with post-pouring we obtained a total of 155 liters of wort, which was boiled for 60 minutes with a non-isomerized bitter hop extract from Yakimachief. We adjusted the bitterness to approx. 25 IBU units. The whirlpool hopping was carried out with the Yakimachief product Dynaboost in the Citra and Mosaic variants.
The wort and 50 liters of hot water for dilution to around 7 °P were cooled and transferred to "Tank Volker"; the Yakimachief product Hyperboost in the Mosaic, Simcoe and Citra variants was added to the tank to boost the aroma. These hop extracts, produced using supercritical carbon dioxide, emphasize the fruity aroma through dry hopping without the dreaded hop creep effect that is common with hop pellets.
The wort is fermented under pressure with Lallemand Brewing LoNa, which we consider to be a very good yeast for the production of non-alcoholic pale ale beers and which is now commercially available. This yeast ferments glucose, fructose and sucrose, and with an original gravity of 7 °P, the alcohol content should be a maximum of 0.5 % vol. based on previous results. In Germany, beers with less than 0.5% alcohol by volume are considered non-alcoholic because it is almost impossible for a healthy person to build up a relevant alcohol content in the blood with such a beer.
The experimental character of this beer and thus in the context of the student internship is essentially that we used rather large amounts of Dynaboost and Hyperboost to achieve a very fruity character. Many of our "test drinkers" do not even notice that our non-alcoholic beers, which we can produce exclusively with maltose-negative yeasts, are in fact alcohol-free, especially as our beers lack the spicy taste and a certain sweetness typical of commercial non-alcoholic beers due to the enrichment with non-fermentable higher sugars through the mashing process and the degradation of the wort aromas by the special yeasts. As we use hop extracts for dry hopping, albeit exclusively extracts that have been produced with supercritical carbon dioxide, these beers are still not beers in the strict sense according to the so-called provisional beer law of 1993 (in Germany), but "only" specialty beers or brewery products.