- Joined
- Aug 31, 2015
- Messages
- 9
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 0
Any tricks to brewing a beer with less than 150 calories but a 6+ ABV?
Low-cal, but not Session
- Thread starter Brewer #50528
- Start date
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2012
- Messages
- 8,615
- Reaction score
- 6,615
- Points
- 113
flaked rice but that high of an abv is not going to work
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2014
- Messages
- 317
- Reaction score
- 2
- Points
- 0
Yeah, I'm not a Rocket Surgeon, but as a diabetic, I have to consider all the carbs, calories, and sugars I consume. And if I learned it right, alcohol is calories. You can't separate the two. You would have to brew a beer with nothing but alcohol contributing to the total, in order to get the highest alcohol to calorie ratio. And then it would suck as a beer. I'm not saying it can't be done, but why would you want to? This is just me, but I enjoy an English Mild as much, or even more than a RIS. When they are well made, small beers are as enjoyable, maybe even more so, because you can drink more of them. If all you want is low cal alcohol, then why not just drink some shots?
Enough moralizing, to answer your question, I have looked through my brew book, and the beers I have made with the lowest calories were the light lagers. I have a Munich helles with a 5.5% ABV at 180 cal. So it would seem the lighter drier beers ,with the least amount of non fermentable sugars will get you in the neighborhood. Try an American light lager recipe, base malt only, no crystal malts, mash low (145F maybe, and for 90+ minuets), add some plain table sugar (10% to 15%) as part of the fermentables, and use a big pitch of clean lager yeast that will eat everything. The idea is to convert all sugar to alcohol, in order to raise the ABV. All sugars will contribute to calories, so the maximum converted to alcohol would give the highest alcohol to calorie ratio. Maybe.
Enough moralizing, to answer your question, I have looked through my brew book, and the beers I have made with the lowest calories were the light lagers. I have a Munich helles with a 5.5% ABV at 180 cal. So it would seem the lighter drier beers ,with the least amount of non fermentable sugars will get you in the neighborhood. Try an American light lager recipe, base malt only, no crystal malts, mash low (145F maybe, and for 90+ minuets), add some plain table sugar (10% to 15%) as part of the fermentables, and use a big pitch of clean lager yeast that will eat everything. The idea is to convert all sugar to alcohol, in order to raise the ABV. All sugars will contribute to calories, so the maximum converted to alcohol would give the highest alcohol to calorie ratio. Maybe.
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2012
- Messages
- 8,615
- Reaction score
- 6,615
- Points
- 113
8 lb's Vienna, 1/2 lb's aromatic, 1/2 lb's 40 crystal, 150 calories but 4.5%, my go to hops for milds Hallertau Mittelfruh, should be tasty
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2012
- Messages
- 10,254
- Reaction score
- 8,363
- Points
- 113
Alcohol is 7 kcal/gram. A 12-ounce beer is for all practical purposes 330 ml. Multiplying that times .05 you get 16.5 ml of pure ethanol. Ethanol masses 0.79 g/ml, yielding 13 grams of alcohol. That's 94 calories of pure alcohol in a 5% beer. At 6% you're at 113 calories just from the alcohol. Wine, although much higher in alcohol, doesn't have a lot of digestible carbohydrates so a four-ounce glass of wine at 12% has only 77 calories.
Dang, I'd forgotten how much I like working in metric units!
Dang, I'd forgotten how much I like working in metric units!
