Truly Non-Alcoholic Beer Question

[FleetingSmoke]

I have been creating a bunch of 1 gallon Pilot brews with the help of my 12 year old son as a brewing assistant.

Here is my question. As part of the brewing process I would like him to be able to join me in "Drinking a Homebrew" while brewing. Of course I want to make sure that there is not alcohol in his drink. He has had Maltzbier at a local German restaurant. I have figured that I can make a wort sans yeast to keep it truly NA. So that he can truly experience the correct drinking experience, I would like to know what might be the best way to carbonate the wort without the help of yeast.

Thanks in advance for you help with this.!

 

[Bigbre04]

I would honestly be very very very careful with this. without the alcohol, carb, yeast, etc. "wort" becomes pretty dangerous bacteria wise. NA beers have to be pasturized commercially.

maybe buy some Malta(or malta light) and pour him some from your glass??? its available from walmart down in Ga.

technically you would force carbonate it just like a beer, but the volumes would be tough.

Maybe pull some wort pre hops and cool it for him. blend it with some soda water.


OR pull some wort and use a soda stream machine to carbonate some diluted wort once it is cold. You could also make some "beer" with DME/LME and some soda water or in the soda stream.

you could also get him some actual NA beers to share. I really like the black butte from deschuetes and the bitburger 0.0 is very good too.

 

[J A]

If you want fizzy malt flavored soda, that's easy to find - Malta Goya or similar in most any supermarket "latin food" aisle.
If you want a "beer" experience, take a quantity of your beer and simmer it to remove alcohol (extra points if you cobble together some pots, bowls and ice to actually collect the alcohol). What you have left should be devoid of alcohol, hoppy and not sweet, as the beer would be. At that point the soda stream will work or if you acquire a small CO2 tank you can use a carb cap and soda bottle to carbonate instantly.
It should be noted that traditional root beer and other soda is carbonated using a small amount of yeast. By arresting the fermentation early on (refrigeration), the amount of alcohol is extremely low.

 

[Mont Y. Märzen]

If the goal is to taste a particular style you are brewing, other than the above suggestions, look into Non-Enzymatic Mashing (NEM) or 'cold mashing'. (mostly similar process, different labels) The idea would be to take a scaled version of your grain bill and mash it, likely overnight, below conversion temps. Hopping will help lower pH too and be more representative of the final real beer. It might even be better to create a Hop Tea, then cool it, and use that as the strike water for the NEM. Acidifying below 5.2 pH is a feature, not a bug, because you don't want to convert starches to sugars. (some enzymes like Maltase are effective at lower temps, which are bypassed in a normal mash.) You may even need to acidify to get pH into normal beer range for safety as well. (plenty of online stats for Ales, Lagers & Sours)

There are lots of uses in regular beer after this, but in your case, you could force carb that wort as-is. (maybe boil and chill first too for safety) There are attachments for soda bottles you could use for very small experimental batches.

https://www.brewhardware.com/category_s/1911.htm (Stainless & Plastic versions listed on this page)

If doing a darker style, you may want to look into the Briess website blog about malt sensory analysis and recipe building. There is a method to conduct trial steeps to dial-in darker malts but the ratios to base are very different from the final product. This allows you to taste the end-effect as if the beer had alcohol in it but without that wort being overly sweet since it is unfermented. Our club is about to start classes on this method and I'll be using it for some upcoming recipes using expensive malts where I don't want to have to burn lots of batches to dial″ Note, in your case, you'd use this process for the same purpose, but your actual product would not use hot-steep, but rather the cold-steep/NEM method above. Hot steep is just to dial-in the dark malt ratio, but I'd stick with the 'balance' of base malt approach this method uses to get a proper end-result.

https://brewingwithbriess.com/blog/hot-steep-training-with-new-glarus/

 

[Dave Y]

I have been creating a bunch of 1 gallon Pilot brews with the help of my 12 year old son as a brewing assistant.

Here is my question. As part of the brewing process I would like him to be able to join me in "Drinking a Homebrew" while brewing. Of course I want to make sure that there is not alcohol in his drink. He has had Maltzbier at a local German restaurant. I have figured that I can make a wort sans yeast to keep it truly NA. So that he can truly experience the correct drinking experience, I would like to know what might be the best way to carbonate the wort without the help of yeast.

Thanks in advance for you help with this.!

Oh man. I got a ration of hate when I tried this for a buddy who does drink N/A beers. I found some help here
https://ultralowbrewing.com/user-recipes-la-na-low-alcohol-new-version/

There is a process difference too. you mash REALLY high temp, grind the grains very coarse.

There's some yeast out there that facilitates a low percentage - <= .5% is the N/A standard. For a zero percent, I agree with the previous comments as a potential path forward.

I was able to make NEIP at .4%ABV despite a couple errors. It wasn't horrible, but definitely not my best effort. It was a hectic brew day because it went very quickly because I didn't change the mill settings, so it was over fast. My gravity was way high so I cut it to the correct level and used special yeast to get across the finish line. On its own, it was kinda 'meh'. But, mixed with Heineken n/a it was pretty good. So doable with the right ingredients & process.

 

[Brew Cat]

Well we're talking about a 12yr old
Probably would rather have a Pepsi cola

 

[Daniel Parshley]

If you want fizzy malt flavored soda, that's easy to find - Malta Goya or similar in most any supermarket "latin food" aisle.
If you want a "beer" experience, take a quantity of your beer and simmer it to remove alcohol (extra points if you cobble together some pots, bowls and ice to actually collect the alcohol). What you have left should be devoid of alcohol, hoppy and not sweet, as the beer would be. At that point the soda stream will work or if you acquire a small CO2 tank you can use a carb cap and soda bottle to carbonate instantly.
It should be noted that traditional root beer and other soda is carbonated using a small amount of yeast. By arresting the fermentation early on (refrigeration), the amount of alcohol is extremely low.

This should work, and if you watch the temperature it should not hurt the flavor. The alcohol will go well before the beer boils. I make root beer and don't worry about the small amount of alcohol. The rule in my house is if you drink beer under 18, you are in the house (or on the property) for the day. You can make 2.3% beer, too. The Army made millions of gallon of this stuff.

 

[Brew Cat]

My rule was you figured it out yourself
I'm friken not helping you to learn how to brew beer at 12
I got in enough trouble stealing a few beers from grandad

 

[Mont Y. Märzen]

My rule was you figured it out yourself
I'm friken not helping you to learn how to brew beer at 12
I got in enough trouble stealing a few beers from grandad

Admittedly the idea was to brew N/A beer, so not illegal, though I understand that alcohol content, of course, is not the only source of trepidation.

But yeah, OP had it mostly figured. Plenty of other viable, perhaps tastier, options, were offered.

 

[Ward Chillington]

Make some root beer...that's what my dad and I did. It was NA and boy was it carbonated!

We used recycled 32 oz soda bottles with screw on caps ....we had a 25% bottle bomb possibly!

I don't think the Hires extract we used is still available but I've seen others out there.