Nonalcoholic Brewing Best Practices

Making nonalcoholic (NA) beer requires different techniques from traditional brewing, especially when using maltose-negative yeast (e.g., Berkeley Yeast’s NA Classic or NA Cabana), which ferments simple sugars but leaves maltose and maltotriose unfermented. Here’s a simplified guide to best practices for brewing NA beer.

Food Safety and Risk Mitigation

You need to treat NA beer like a perishable food product because NA beer lacks the natural protection against spoilage and pathogens that comes from alcohol production. The fermentation process produces less CO₂ and less pH reduction and leaves more nutrients for unwanted microbes. From the time you cool your wort to the time you pasteurize, you are at an elevated risk.

• pH: Ensure the final beer pH is below 4.6 (even better if you are below 4.2; lower is always better, especially if pasteurization isn’t an option).
• Good Manufacturing Practices: Follow good manufacturing practices (GMP) and implement a robust sanitation program to limit contamination.
• Pasteurization: The gold standard is to pasteurize after packaging.
• Handling: Minimize the number of steps post-fermentation (e.g., dry hopping, fruit additions) to reduce contamination risk.
• Preservatives: Consider using typical food preservatives. They can be helpful against some, but not all, organisms.
• Temperature: As with many foods, low temperature reduces the food safety risk. Ferment quickly and chill quickly. Make additions (including hops) at cold temperatures. Do not harvest and repitch yeast, as this can carry over contaminants.

NA Yeast and NA Beer Are Different

Outside of providing food safety, ethanol not only contributes its own flavor, but it also influences the perception of other flavors in beer, both desirable and undesirable. A shift in ethanol levels alters the overall flavor balance. Couple that with unfermented maltose and maltotriose, and you have an altogether different product. This requires careful reconsideration of the remaining components and necessitates adjustments to the recipe and process to maintain the desired sensory characteristics.

Curious about how NA yeast work? Talk to an expert at Berkeley Yeast.

Yeast Selection

The yeasts in Berkeley Yeast’s NA series are the first and only Saccharomyces strains bioengineered to make NA beer that tastes like beer. These strains have been engineered to be maltose and maltotriose negative, which limits the production of alcohol. They’re also engineered to overproduce the key beer-flavor compounds at the levels you get from full-strength fermentation. So the beer actually tastes like beer and not like partially fermented wort.

• Berkeley’s NA Classic is designed to be highly versatile, so you can use it to make a complete beer or a base layer for a flavor-forward product.
• Berkeley’s NA Cabana amplifies tropical notes and provides a solid foundation for both clear and hazy IPAs.

Targets

Start with an original gravity (OG) of 5–7°P (1.020–1.028) and target a real degree of fermentation (RDF) of 10–20 percent. A 5°P OG with a typical two-row-malt bill should yield a 0.5 percent ABV product. Higher RDF typically means more fermentation character, but also higher ABV.

Finished beer pH needs to be below 4.6 at a minimum, and ideally below 4.2.

Recipe Considerations

• Mouthfeel & Foam: Use ingredients such as wheat, maltodextrin, or dextrin malt to improve mouthfeel and foam stability. Consider tetrahydro-iso-alpha acids or hexahydro-iso-alpha acids to help with foam stability.
• Color: Design your malt bill for flavor first. Color can be adjusted downstream with malt-derived color additives.
• Acid Addition: Adjusting pH with food-grade acids will improve sensory qualities. There are blends available commercially, but consider experimenting with different acids on your own. Use them at different parts of the process. Hot-side additions can help reduce your IBUs and put you in the food-safe zone as soon as you cool your wort.
• Hops: Aim for a lower IBU target. Without ethanol, high IBUs can come off harsh. Focus on late hot-side hop additions for authentic hop character and consider hop extracts for flavor and aroma. Start with a lower dry-hop amount than you typically do for standard beer.
• Sweeteners: There are many different ways to impact the perception of sweetness—too many to list. Experiment with different sweeteners to help with balance. Note: if you are tunnel pasteurizing, you can use glucose or fructose in post-fermentation chilled product; you will inactivate the yeast through pasteurization.
• CO₂: Aim for higher CO₂ levels during packaging to enhance sensory quality and safety.

Benchtop tests: Early in your NA journey, it is incredibly helpful to conduct benchtop tests with different downstream additives (e.g., acids, sweeteners, colorants, mouthfeel, flavorings). You can quickly increase your experience understanding how to balance NA beer by benchtopping hundreds of different variations from a single brew.

Recipes

We've put together a couple of recipes to highlight the ingredients and process to brew a delicious NA beer at your brewery:

• Recipe: Tim Sciascia’s NA West Coast IPA: Brewing a tasty nonalcoholic beer is dramatically different from brewing one of normal strength—but this recipe provides a great jumping-off point for making something pleasurably hoppy but without the alcohol.
• Recipe: Tim Sciascia’s NA Light “Lager”: NA beer production’s shortened fermentation can move this “lager” from grain to glass in as little as one week.

Process Tips

• Mash: Use a higher mash temperature (160–165°F/71–74°C) and shorter rest times (~5–10 minutes) to limit fermentability and control RDF. Increase your liquor-to-grist ratio and consider increased acid additions to avoid high pH through lautering.
• Lautering: Use rice hulls if your lauter bed is too shallow.
• Cooling: Be mindful of freezing risks in the cooling process, as NA beer may freeze at higher temperatures than regular beer.
• Filtration: Always use clean filters to prevent contamination. Removing yeast before pasteurizing will lead to improved finished beer flavor.

Packaging and Pasteurization

• Bottles and Cans: The best format for packaging your beer is in bottles and cans. Kegs and draft lines have a much higher risk of contamination and are not recommended.
• Packaging Process: Compared to traditional beer packaging, NA packaging should occur at higher beer temperatures, higher carbonation levels, and lower foamability. Adjust your packaging line accordingly to reduce beer waste and decrease dissolved-oxygen (DO) pick up.
• Pasteurization: Tunnel pasteurization is the best way to ensure your beverage is free from spoilage and pathogenic organisms.

Testing and QA/QC

Routine testing for pH, flavor, and microbial contamination is crucial throughout the process. Work with a process authority (recommended, although not required for NA beer) to validate safety and quality.

Adopting these best practices can help minimize risks and improve the sensory characteristics of your NA beer.

Have questions? Reach out!

About the Authors

Anthony Bledsoe is an experienced leader with a diverse background in quality, process improvement, brewing, operations, and innovation. After graduating from the UC Davis Master Brewers Program, he worked across small craft breweries such as Kona Brewing (as the director of brewing ops), regional breweries such as Craft Brew Alliance and Tilray, and global operations with AB InBev (as the innovation manager).

In January 2024, Anthony became Berkeley Yeast’s VP of product strategy. He works closely with all departments to help us continually push the technology of fermentation forward, and he helps our customers identify opportunities and provide solutions informed by working at breweries of every conceivable scale.

Tim Sciascia was hired in 2008 as a cellar person at Marin Brewing Co. north of San Francisco. Over five years, he moved up through the cellar and filtration positions, finally becoming the assistant brewer.

In 2013, Tim cofounded Cellarmaker Brewing Co. as the director of brewing and blending. Over 11 years, he helped grow Cellarmaker to nearly 6,000 barrels on dual 15- and 20-barrel systems. Hops and barrel-aged strong ales have always been of particular interest to him, and he has fermented award-winning beers with Berkeley Yeast strains for more than five years. Tim is now brand ambassador at Berkeley Yeast.