This Is How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Really Made

There is a non-alcoholic beer boom going on right now, and a big part of it is coming from just how those beers are made. Unlike low-alcohol beer, which has an alcohol-by-volume in the 0.5 to 2.5% range, NA beer can have anywhere from zero up to 0.5% alcohol by volume. For years it was a flavorless punchline, but non-alcoholic beers have suddenly become one of the biggest trends in beer drinking over the past few years. In 2024 alone, sales surged 26%, per NBC News, even as traditional alcohol sales slightly declined. While some of this has been attributed to a rise in concerns of alcohol's negative health effects, there is also the undeniable fact that lots of modern breweries are making non-alcoholic beers that taste great and are sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing.

That change didn't just come about because of demand for NA beer, it came about due to innovations in the brewing process that have helped maintain the normal qualities of beer in their alcohol-free offshoots. There are actually a few different ways to make NA beer, but the two most common are controlled fermentation and alcohol removal, also called dealcoholization. In the first, beer is brewed in a strict way to produce less alcohol, while in the second it is brewed more normally, then has the alcohol removed. And both these methods have been impacted by breakthroughs that just happened in the past decade, from a better understanding of yeast to new filtration methods.

The big innovation that has really helped non-alcoholic beer is a process called vacuum evaporation. This starts by making beer through standard brewing methods. Then the alcohol is removed by evaporating it out of the beer. Normally this would require heating the beer to a high temperature, but in a vacuum the evaporation point is lowered to a cool 68 degrees Fahrenheit, making it easier to remove the alcohol without compromising other aspects of the beer. These are more advanced methods of boiling the alcohol out of beer that were used during prohibition. The evaporation isn't a perfectly precise process, which is why there can be remnants of the alcohol up to that 0.5%.

There are also other methods using a membrane to filter alcohol out. This is done by a process called reverse osmosis, which traps alcohol and some water, but lets flavor compounds pass. Then a small amount of water is added back to get the original level of dilution. However this process is more expensive, so vacuum evaporation has helped keep NA beer more affordable.

Brewers like these methods of removing alcohol after the fact because you can get results that are closer to classic beers. The beer still undergoes all of the processes that form the flavor compounds drinkers like, and then the alcohol is simply extracted from the full-flavored brew. That's how even full-flavored options like a non-alcoholic IPA can taste like the real thing.

The second way we get non-alcoholic beer is with a different brewing process. These start with the same classic beer ingredients, water, a grain, hops, and yeast, but by altering ratios, temperature, and the types of yeast, brewers can produce beer that ferments little or no alcohol. Low temperatures for example will still allow the yeast to form flavor compounds, but not alcohol. The beer yeast can also be fed a lower quantity of sugar. There are also strains of yeast that are engineered so they don't consume certain types of sugar. Each one of these alterations to the process can reduce the alcohol in beer, and they can also be used in combination with each other. However, by not fully fermenting alcohol, this method of brewing can also fail to produce some of the flavors drinkers like. New strains of yeast developed recently have started to address this problem, leading to some of the new higher-quality NA beers.

The methods that filter out alcohol and the controlled fermentation methods can also be combined with each other. Some popular brands like Athletic Brewing make non-alcoholic beer this way. All the products and new techniques developed recently are complementary to each other, and brewers' knowledge about making non-alcoholic beer is constantly expanding. That means NA beer had only started to tap into the potential of how good, or how popular, it can be.