Zero alcohol (or >0.5% to be exact) is our fastest growing beer market by a significant margin, rivalling even the hazy explosion that upended the scene almost ten years ago. The factors driving this rapid expansion are many, but as a critic I’m only interested in one: Does it taste like beer yet? While the health benefits and automotive liberty granted are both obvious and undeniable, until very recently the miracle drink had one fatal setback. It wasn’t fooling anyone.
Worty (the taste of unfermented beer), tomato soup, malt extract, soda water… These were all tasting notes that haunted the zero offerings in their initial years, and when one considers what absurdly little producers have to work with when brewing under 0.5% abv, it’s little surprise. The very fundamentals of beer revolve around fermentation, where the yeast imparts subtle but crucial flavour and structure to the beer. Take that away and the balance crumbles.
In the last few years however, things have changed. These ‘impossible’ beers are finally getting there. Advances in yeast strains have continued, with murmurs of genetically engineered alcohol-free yeast in development overseas. But the most fundamental leap in quality has been a technological one – birthing a new breed of ‘alcohol removed’ beer.
This new generation of zero beer isn’t strangled during fermentation, it begins life as a full strength drop, and then it gets weird. The beer is effectively distilled in reverse, with the alcohol being evaporated and the remaining liquid used. Normally, this would require heating to the boiling point of ethanol (78.37°C), which would annihilate any character the beer might have once possessed. But, as anyone who has made tea at altitude will have noticed, as air pressure drops, so do boiling points.
If undertaken at extremely low pressure, this process of alcohol evaporation can be made to take place at room temperature, allowing the alcohol to be gently excised from a beer while leaving it’s delicate flavours intact. The process is called vacuum separation, and it isn’t remotely cheap, but Auckland contract mega-brewery Steam has made massive investment into the technology, which has made it accessible to smaller producers.
Such a cost heavy process is currently only viable for pricey craft brands, and while the mass market producers offer their own alcohol-free ranges, the difference in quality is often stark. A good way of identifying a beer that’s been de-alcoholised properly is to check the calories. As the alcohol is removed, so goes most of the energy in beer (another bonus health benefit), so these beers will typically sport less than 40 calories in a 330ml can.
As for recommendations, I can now happily say that the majority of craft offerings are now reliably high quality. Batch Brewing All Day IPA deserves mention as the first prototype that started it all, while Epic SuperZero and Garage Project Tiny XPA are excellent recent releases.
Tim Newman
