Brewing Process Challenges in Nonalcoholic Beer

The writing is on the wall for brewers: Consumers are drinking less alcohol than ever before. But this hasn’t kept them from drinking beer—they’re just drinking nonalcoholic (NA) offerings from both traditional brewers and smaller upstarts. In 2022 alone, sales of NA beers grew by 20%, and worldwide, NA beer had become a $22-billion industry—projected to reach $40 billion in the next decade, according to a 2023 report from Global Market Insights.

In a $750-billion global beer market, $40 billion might seem like a drop in the bucket, but it’s a drop that major brewers are taking seriously. Among the most significant indicators of the market shift toward NA offerings is the news that brewing colossus AB InBev, owner of Budweiser and Corona as well as many other beers, aims to make 20% of its beers NA by 2025.

The Challenges

Despite a similarity in taste and texture between NA and traditionally brewed beer, the two products are made very differently. The challenge appears from the very beginning, says Richard Preiss, co-founder and lab director at Guelph, Ontario’s Escarpment Labs, which cultivates and produces a variety of yeasts for both professional and home brewers. “The most important thing is going to sound pedantic,” Preiss says, “but what makes regular beer different from nonalcoholic beer is alcohol. And we have to also consider what alcohol is. It doesn’t just have intoxicating effects; it defines the product in every other way imaginable. Even if everything else was exactly the same on a molecular level, the fact that there’s not alcohol changes the taste and everything else about the product, so it is really important. Alcohol is one of the flavors that brings these things all together. You take it away and the whole system is thrown out of balance.”

Bryan Donaldson is brewing innovation manager for Petaluma, Calif.-based Lagunitas Brewing Company, which saw enough success as a craft brewer over past decades that Heineken ultimately bought a 50% stake in the company. He’s blunt about the vacancy created by the absence of alcohol. “Turns out, alcohol is a great carrier of flavor,” Donaldson says. “Without alcohol in the product, the challenge of replicating flavors becomes almost infinitely more difficult, but it also challenges you to become more creative.”

Preiss agrees, saying, “Alcohol can make certain flavor molecules much more flavor-active to us. It can make other flavor molecules less active to us. In the context of regular beer, that is part of what creates the sort of standard flavor profile and quality. Alcohol is super critical from a flavor perspective. Immediately, if we take the alcohol out or don’t produce it, we have some gaps we need to fill in.”

Both Preiss and Donaldson underline the preservative, antimicrobial role that ethanol plays in regular beer; in its absence, brewers have been forced to figure out their own food safety protocols.

John Walker agrees. He is co-founder of Athletic Brewing Company, a brewery that produces only NA beers that has grown to command a significant share of the American NA market. As Athletic was developing its products, Walker says, there was no literature on food safety for NA beer. “So, we were trying to figure a lot of stuff out,” he adds. An added challenge was the fact that with NA beer, because you need this microbially stable product, you lose out on a number of steps that you usually get to enjoy in normal brewing with ethanol as a preservative, such as adding fruit safely during or after fermentation, or dry hopping. “All these things that add complexity to the brewing process become either not doable or an extreme challenge in nonalcoholic,” he says.