The growth in no and low alcohol products presents a real opportunity for craft brewers to enter and disrupt a growing market dominated almost exclusively by the big global players, explains Andrew Paterson, technical sales manager for the UK at Lallemand Brewing.

In the craft beer industry we are used to transient developments in beer styles which seem to come and go over the years. These can be short lasting; Brut IPA anybody? Popular in the medium term, Saison; or long lasting with multiple reiterations, IPA, American West Coast IPA or NEIPA. 

One style which seems likely to buck this trend is low and no alcohol beer. While technically a category in its own right rather than a style per se, sales of low and no alcohol beer are outperforming the beer industry as a whole with UK annual sales growth of 28%, and a current European market share of 6%.

Big brewing companies are investing heavily in the trend with the largest global brewer AB InBev predicting that no and low will make up 20% of its global sales by 2025. Others are entering the market with innovative new products such as Heineken Zero and Carlsberg 0.0%.

The growth in no and low alcohol products presents a real opportunity for craft brewers to enter and disrupt a growing market dominated almost exclusively by the big global players. AB InBev CEO Carlos Brito almost summed it up perfectly when he said: “Choice is key, the NABLAB category is no longer about having one or two alternatives to traditional beers: it’s about mirroring the choice found in the traditional beer category with a wide range of no and low beers”. 

Herein lies the advantage for craft brewers. 

Craft brewers have always been more agile and innovative than the global players, while creating choice for consumers is the mainstay of their business. Until now the no and low category has been dominated by lager and wheat beer styles. With craft brewers entering the game the potential for innovation within the sector is almost limitless.

While clearly a market in growth there are real barriers to entry to the no and low market for Craft and Global brewers alike. These can broadly be broken into three distinct areas. The first of these is flavour; it is not easy to develop a low alcohol product. There are various methods than can be employed and most require capital investment in plant and machinery. 

This leads us to the second issue; this capital investment might be achievable at the larger brewers but is probably beyond the reach of most craft brewers. Finally there is the question of how to assess the market potential of newly developed products. 

For the craft brewer the route to market for no and low alcohol products is far more of a challenge than for larger brewers. The assessment of this market access will ultimately control how much effort is put into new product development and where investments should be made.    

At Lallemand we recognise the need for a reliable method of creating a credible tasting, low alcohol beer without the need for capital investment. This led us to review the current methods of creating low alcohol beer without specialist equipment and see how we might apply our knowledge and cutting edge research in the areas of yeast, fermentation and carbohydrate chemistry to improving these techniques.

The high temperature mashing technique

The most often used method for creating low alcohol beer in craft breweries is based around the process of high temperature mashing. Understanding this method requires a certain degree of knowledge of mashing biochemistry.

Essentially the idea is that you alter the fermentability of the wort by using a high mash temperature to inactivate the beta amylase enzyme, which generates the vast majority of fermentable sugar in a brewery fermentation. At the same time you allow enough residual alpha amylase activity to break down the starch molecules within the malt into longer chain dextrins and sugars, thereby preventing starch positive and hazy beers.

Using this method will not produce alcohol free beers, as no matter how mashing is conducted some fermentable sugars will be produced. The amount of alcohol that can be generated from these fermentable sugars can be altered to some degree by using specific yeast strains which are not capable of fermenting the sugar maltotriose, in this case Lalbrew Windsor and Lalbrew London. This has the effect of making the wort more unfermentable than it otherwise would be when using yeasts strains which are capable of metabolising this sugar. 

Clearly in addition to the correct choice of yeast the key to the success of this method is the temperature used for mashing and the resultant dextrin profile of the wort. Most microbreweries lack the facilities for an in depth investigation of this dextrin profile and therefore results are based on trial and error.

Work we have done has elucidated the effect of differing mash temperatures on this method and allowed us to create some guidelines for brewers wishing to create low alcohol beers using this technique. Please see our following best practice document for recommendations of mash temperatures and yeast strains to use when targeting different alcohol levels in low alcohol beer.  

The experiment

In order to create our best practice document, we designed a study to investigate the effect of temperature on the mashing process. We undertook trial mashes on a laboratory mash bath for a series of different times and temperatures. See fig 1. The worts from these trials were first tested with iodine to give an idea of the level of starch breakdown within the wort.

See fig 1. Interestingly we saw that starch breakdown was almost complete at 74 and 78 degrees, temperatures that would ordinarily be considered very high for a brewery mash. At 82 degrees iodine tests suggested that starch breakdown had occurred but to a lesser extent than at the lower temperatures. This is what we consider to be the sweet spot for low alcohol beer production using the high mash temperature technique. Above 82 degrees we saw that there is limited starch breakdown, this would lead to hazy and starch positive beers.  

Following iodine tests these worts were stabilised at high temperature before being sent to one of our laboratories in the eastern US for further analysis by size exclusion chromatography (SEC). This allowed us to investigate the breakdown of different sized sugars within the wort from one glucose unit up to a chain of seven glucose units (DP-1 to DP-7).

Figure 2 shows the sugars present within a brewery wort from DP-1 to DP-7. Figure 3 shows the initial results obtained by size exclusion chromatography detailing the proportions of sugars created at different temperatures from degree of polymerisation 1 to degree of polymerisation 7, as well as higher molecular weight dextrins (HWM or High DP dextrins).

The findings of the size exclusion chromatography revealed that at the lower temperatures of 74 and 78 degrees higher proportions of fermentable sugar (DP-1 to DP-3) were created. This was in line with our expectations from the previous work done using iodine. Interestingly the results also suggested a significant amount of fermentable sugar was created at 95 degrees.

This can probably be attributed to starch hydrolysis due to the high temperature. When looking at the longer chain sugars (DP-4-DP7), we saw that greater proportions were created at the higher temperatures of 82 degrees and 95 degrees. Interestingly at 86 degrees less of these longer chain sugars were produced.

This would indicate that at this temperature alpha amylase activity is significantly reduced leading to an increased amount of higher molecular weight dextrin material but less longer chain sugars due to temperature mediated hydrolysis. Analysis of this data allowed us to produce a heat map showing the potential of each temperature for creating low alcohol wort. See fig 4.

Finally we subjected the worts to MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. In this technology the worts were vaporised and the constituent sugars ionised by irradiation with a laser before being accelerated through an electric field. The point (time of flight required to hit the detector) at which the ionised sugars hit the detector corresponds to their accurate molecular mass (mass to charge ratio; m/z) and therefore, correlate accurately to their degree of polymerisation. See fig 5.

This allowed us to look at the relative abundance of various DPs of sugars all the way from DP-3 to DP-30. A clear peak can be seen corresponding to the mass of maltoheptaose at 82 degrees indicating good breakdown of starch to longer chain unfermentable sugars at this temperature, but as previously seen, without being starch positive.

Other considerations

In addition to the mash temperature there are other considerations one must take into account when brewing low alcohol beer. Worts created using this method must be low in starting gravity to prevent too much sugar being produced.

The worts we used were between 1.020 and 1.027. This can lead to a lack of body which can be combatted using lactose and chloride heavy water as a mouthfeel enhancer. In addition the lower amount of malt creates a lower pH buffering capacity when compared to an ordinary brewery wort.

The pH must be monitored and controlled to within normal brewing specifications throughout the process. Failure to control pH can lead to astringent and overly bitter beers through extraction of tannin material and excessive hop utilisation.

Finally this work could not have been possible without the help of our excellent teams in the R&D laboratories. Special thanks go to Sivakumar Pattathil at Mascoma, NH, USA and Jeff Zhang at AB Vickers UK.