Dr. Tom Shellhammer

There's a huge growth category in low and non-alcoholic beverages, beer, wine, and spirits.

The divide that you have to cross to get from a spirit to an alcoholic spirit is huge.

The brewers have to cross a much shorter divide.

It's like only 5%.

And so I think that's why you're seeing a lot of activity in this non-alcoholic beer space.

And the way that brewers are making non-alcoholic beer fall into three categories.

One is to take a normal fermentation and just arrest it, stop it prematurely.

Those are kind of first generation non-alcoholic beers.

They're not terribly satisfying because they taste very worty, very sweet.

They're kind of cloying.

They don't mimic a full-on alcohol beer.

Another approach is to use techniques where you take a full strength beer and just remove the alcohol.

And so you can do this by distillation or by membrane separation.

What happens there is that you're, in addition to pulling alcohol out, you're also pulling out a lot of these other flavors.

And we talked at the beginning of the show around like higher alcohols or esters or other things that will move kind of like the ethanol away from the base beer.

And so you get a very bland product.

And so in that case, brewers will do flavor add-backs that will take like these alcohol, like higher alcohol ester materials that have left and add those back to try to replace that minus the ethanol.

And then a third approach is to use yeast that don't ferment maltose.

So the main sugar in a brewery mash is maltose.

There's a little bit of glucose, a tiny bit of fructose, but mainly maltose from a fermentability perspective and something called maltotriose.