PeeBee's Brewday - Low Alcohol Beer

[peebee]

Instead of bottling I will boil the entire brew for a few hours, let it cool, check the gravity, add priming sugar and bottle

You'll need to add yeast.

... and more beer to try and mask the taste of that technique.


I hope to restart my "low alcohol" attempts soon. I've been holding the project "in-abeyance" for some months ensuring I've got ample supplies of the fully leaded variety available during this virus crisis thingy. But I'm getting pretty bored of ginger cordial and orange juice spritzers on my abstention days (at least I'm still sticking to "abstention days", which is important if I want to re-start the project).

 

[bobukbrewer]

Only boil 90% of the beer and 30 minutes should be plenty, cool and add back the 10%, then bottle in the normal way - so no need to add more yeast....

 

[peebee]

This is where I was at when leaving off last March:

Hi @thorners. I'll be kicking off again before March is out (I hope so, 'cos I suspect my current "abstention beer" will run out next time I touch the tap). It will be a "cold extract" brew using pale malt as I'm counting on a 0.5% formulation will not have some of the "notable characteristics" of my former 1.5% cold extract brew. I reckon cold mashed/extracted pale malt should introduce more flavour than Munich malt 'cos I can use 3x the quantity in a cold extract*.
Cheers


[EDIT: *Not forgetting I could use 3x as much cold extracted Munich malt too. Best of both worlds?]

But since then we've had some interesting diastatic malts become easily available: RedX (Bestmalz, 30EBC) and "Imperial Malt" (Simpson's, 45EBC) to try instead of Munich malt (20-22EBC). I'm also intrigued by Chevallier barley malt because it delivers "body" that I've found isn't due to dextrin (like "cold mash" does?).

All getting ahead of myself; first off I want to try the the "cold extract" ("cold mash") with just pale malt.

I can feel the motivation stirring …

 

[peebee]

Only boil 90% of the beer and 30 minutes should be plenty, cool and add back the 10%, then bottle in the normal way - so no need to add more yeast....

Good point. And almost like my suggestion to "add more beer"! Actually, you don't need to "boil" either, just heat to above the boiling point of ethyl alcohol. It still "cooks" the beer though ( ).

But people should be aware you can't boil off the alcohol entirely. This came up again to a wider audience during this virus thingy: Look up why 91% isopropyl alcohol is much cheaper than 99% - I should have known this anyway but still went out and bought the 99% stuff; which then needed diluting to 70% to be effective. Money eh, "easy come, easy go"!

 

[rb982]

I like the idea of boiling 90% and then adding the 10%. Will give this a go as an easy experiment and see where it gets me. Thanks!!

 

[peebee]

Let's be a bit more outspoken …

I started this thread (notice the title) trying differing techniques to brew low-alcohol beer on the basis that a few commercial enterprises were having some success. And I've been having some success too, though I think there are plenty of tweaks that might improve the finished beer and the techniques creating it.

I didn't start this thread to go over the previously discredited techniques of heating (even boiling ) what might have been decent beer to reduce the alcohol. I do not want to be associated with that useless technique.

HEATING BEER TO DRIVE OFF THE ALCOHOL MAKES A SH!T TASTING DRINK!!!

Please start another thread to discuss that method. I promise to be rude to any attempts to discuss that stupid method on this thread. Please go stick your buckets of beer in a different oven.