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Why do low and non-alcoholic beers taste so much closer to the “real thing” than non-alcoholic wines do?
Ron Dippold
San Diego, California, US
Basically, it comes down to time invested. Just think about how terrible early vegetarian meat and dairy substitutes were – it is the same thing here. Brewers have been working on non-alcoholic beer seriously since the 1920s (the Prohibition era in the US, when alcohol was illegal). This is a far earlier start than for non-alcoholic wine, and it shows.
As a brewer, I can tell you it is quite hard to make a non-alcoholic drink (defined as anything less than 0.5 per cent alcohol) that tastes like an alcoholic drink. Beside the grains, the primary factor for all the flavours is the yeast. Depending on the temperature, ingredients and yeast used, you can produce hundreds of different alcohols and other compounds. But if you want to make a non-alcoholic drink, you have three main options.
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While beer brewers have been working on this problem for a long time, the idea of non-alcoholic wine as a market is fairly new
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First, you can make an alcoholic drink with yeast, then remove most of the alcohol from the beer after it has been brewed. This was the most commonly used method for brewing alcohol-free beer until about 10 years ago. Indeed, the byproduct of distilling beer to whiskey is low-alcohol beer, and the byproduct of distilling wine to brandy is low-alcohol wine. Unfortunately, it is very hard to remove the alcohol without severely affecting the flavour, so you could definitely tell which was a “near beer” before 2010.
Second, you can make a non-alcoholic drink and then try to recreate the other flavours. This is the only way to get a truly zero-alcohol drink, but this is hard to achieve because the other flavours aren’t fully understood. This approach can work for “mocktails” (non-alcoholic cocktails) because they tend to have strong flavours. But it usually doesn’t work well for beer or wine, which have a more pure flavour. With non-alcoholic beer, you get something like barley soda. With wine, you get weird grape juice. But there is another option.
The third option is to use yeast that is allowed to ferment, but in a controlled way, so it produces the usual flavours with only a fraction of the alcohol. Beer-makers have really made this work in the past decade, so you get a low-alcohol beer that still tastes like beer. It is, in my opinion, the optimal solution so far. The entire process is the same as for a “real” beer, but you just get less than 0.5 per cent alcohol.
While brewers have been working on this problem for a long time, and – as mentioned – the strong flavours in cocktails let you make passable mocktails without too much effort, the idea of non-alcoholic wine as a market is fairly new, so it is still catching up. As far as I know, removing the alcohol from wine still gets you terrible “wine”, and there isn’t yet an option to use low-alcohol yeast. But some companies are doing fairly well with the second method: taking a version of grape juice and adding tannins, salinity and minerals to get close to the taste of real wine. Some of them get pretty close, and I would say they are better than bad wine, but they aren’t quite as far along as beers are. Just give them time.
Jussi Tolvi
London, UK
The quick answer is the difference in alcohol content: full-strength wines are up to 15 per cent alcohol by volume (ABV), whereas most beers are under 5 per cent. Removing more alcohol also removes more of what we perceive as the flavour of wine or beer. You can produce a decent beer with fermentation restricted to 0.5 per cent alcohol, but alcohol-free wines are almost all de-alcoholised from full-strength wine. That de-alcoholisation process, unfortunately, also removes flavour compounds.
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