Gluten Free Home Brewing Blog
Low & Non-Alcohol via Cold Extraction
Each year around this time, I receive emails, phone calls and text messages asking about brewing low alcohol and/or no alcohol beer. For many years I referred folks to an article from Brew Your Own Magazine titled 'Brew a Great Non-Alcoholic Beer'. This article was removed (or relocated) from their website at an unknown time. But essentially, it covered the process of removing alcohol post fermentation by cooking off the alcohol from the beer, like cooking off the alcohol when using wine while cooking dinner. The major drawback to this process is that it also removes most of the flavor.
Since March 2023, I have referred folks to Zach Griffin's post on the Zero Tolerance Facebook page. The post has been helpful for those GFHBers that were interested in exploring the process themselves. However, many of our customers would prefer a tried and true method that yields repeatable results. While others would prefer a LA or NA recipe kit with step-by-step instructions.
If you subscribe to our newsletter then you are probably familiar with my health challenges over the past couple years, in particular, this past year. I have brewed exactly once in 2024 when I was developing the Uprooted Fruited Sour extract recipe kit. I have tried several times this year to work on the LA/NA project, but I have focused most of my time outside of work on healing and getting healthy. Fortunately, I may be closer to understanding my specific health condition then at any point in my life. So I have set a date, Monday December 30th, after I return from our holiday vacation, to finally brew what I hope will be a flavorful and robust LA/NA homebrew.
Method
The processes in the article by Briess included Passive Extraction, Agitated Vessel, and Lauter Recirculation. Since we use the Grainfather all-in-one brewing system, we elected to use the Lauter Recirculation method. This also allowed us to shorten the time required for the Passive Extraction, and avoided the equipment we don't currently have that the Agitated Vessel method required. We did not achieve the target water temperature because we relied on staging the water outside overnight. The night of our brew session was a much warmer night than we have been experiencing this year. We also left the malt in our shed overnight to avoid any temperature variations in the strike water and malt.
Brew Day
Using the Grainfather, we recirculated the wort through the malt for one hour. Samples were taken at 30 and 60 minutes. Each sample was observed for color and aroma, and the specific gravity was measured. Afterwhich, we tasted each sample for a sensory assessment. After the initial 60 minutes concluded, the mash was increased to 175F over an additional 60+ minutes.
Conclusions
Our initial thoughts about the cold extraction method is that it could have a few applications. The first may be for low alcohol / non-alcohol gluten-free beer, which is the primary reason we explored this method. Using the cold extraction method could allow additional time to extract as much from the malt as possible, resulting in a more flavorful beer. Without having conducted the brew session, it is not yet known if it would also affect other factors such as body, mouthfeel, foam, etc. If there is benefit in the cold extraction method, one simple reason may be time. It doesn't require any attention using the Passive Extraction method, and very little attention during the Lauter Recirculation method. So it could in theory allow for a longer "mash" process before you ever start your brew day.
One reason that we wanted to explore this method for low alcohol / non-alcohol gluten-free beer was due to the lower amounts of diastatic power in gluten-free malt. There would be no need for the use of exogenous enzymes, and the lower diastatic power would most likely result in extremely low mash efficiency. Therefore, the hope was to extract as much as possible from the malt. While this is generally the goal of every brewer each time they brew, it seemed like it could be more relevant for low alcohol / non-alcohol beers that have a reputation of lacking flavor.
Ultimately, it may require comparing the cold extraction method with other conventional methods. This could include conducting cold extraction, cold extraction + rising step mash, and conventional single infusion, and rising step mash. These could be performed with or without exogenous enzymes. But before someone takes on this endeavour, I would suggest circling back around the conclusion of the video. What is the goal? What are the current problems brewers are experiencing? Having not attempted a low alcohol / non-alcohol gluten-free beer previously, I don't yet have "problems" that need to be "fixed". This may change once I follow through with this brewing process and have a final product.