A couple of years ago, requesting ‘no or low’ alcohol beer, wine, or spirits at a bar may have elicited a blank gaze, or a recommendation for a soft drink.
Now it appears that every beer brand has their own NoLo version of their item, and white wine, and spirits may not be far behind. A collaboration between the University of Adelaide and the Australian White Wine Research Study Institute (AWRI) has been recently revealed, in part to develop much better NoLo white wine.
These NoLo products aren’t being marketed to those who don’t drink, rather as an alternative for those who do beverage, who want to drink less, or have something that’s a healthier option.
So, what’s the science behind NoLo red wine and beer, and how do they even work?
Beer
Let’s start with beer, perhaps the much easier of the 2 to make.
Professor Benjamin Schulz, a University of Queensland biochemist, is a self-confessed ‘craft beer snob’.
In 2015 he belonged to a group that released a research study which utilized mass spectrometry to analyse the proteins in different kinds of beer.
He explains that NoLo beer isn’t simply beer flavoured soft drink, but a routine beer– made with grain, hops, yeast, and water, with the alcohol eliminated afterwards.
“One method is to make a regular complete strength alcohol beer, however then get rid of the alcohol with a process like distillation, or reverse osmosis. It’s my understanding that’s the methods that’s utilized by the majority of huge industrial breweries around the globe,” he states.
Distillation is a process where the ‘routine’ beer is heated up– since water, alcohol, and other components of the beer have different boiling points, you can vaporize some parts of the beer however not others. You can then blend the water and other components of the beer back together but leave the alcohol behind.
Reverse osmosis on the other hand uses a thin membrane that lets through just water and alcohol.
These procedures work reasonably well for easy beers like lager. However, for more complex hoppy beers, distillation ‘ruins’ the beer– getting rid of a lot of the delicate flavour compounds. To do this with less flavour substance elimination, distillation is often carried out in a vacuum at greater pressure. This makes the boiling point lower and produces less modifications to the flavour of the beer as a result.
Reverse osmosis is much better however still isn’t ideal. These flower, fruity or bitter compounds might not come through the same way in a NoLo beer.
Schulz notes that there are other– more experimental– ways of making low alcohol beer.
One approach is to simply start with less sugar. Less sugar means less food for yeast to treat on to then become ethanol.
There’s also the yeast that’s used in the beer. The genus used, called Saccharomyces is typically great at turning a sugar product plentiful in beer, called maltose, into alcohol. However, other yeast pressures– such as Saccharomycodes ludwigii, or Zygosaccharomyces lentus are ‘maltose unfavorable strains’. This suggests that they don’t utilize maltose to produce alcohol, and for that reason they produce much less alcohol in the end product.
These methods are more frequently utilized amongst craft beer manufacturers who do not have the expensive equipment and can more easily experiment with different pressures or ways to produce their item.
Get an update of science stories provided directly to your inbox.
If you’re looking for a brand-new NoLo beer to try, Schultz states these craft beers using different yeast stress could be the way to go.
“I have tasted a couple of non-alcoholic craft beers, sort of trying to utilize the style of an XPA, and they were made with yeast that didn’t ferment maltose, and they really tasted exceptionally great,” he states.
“They weren’t as spicy and sort of flavorful as the alcoholic equivalents, but they were actually, actually tasty and revitalizing.”
Wine
As the alcohol concentration of an item goes up, the harder it is to make the comparable non-alcoholic variation taste like the initial. This suggests that NoLo red wine is more difficult to make taste like wine than what beer, and spirits are even harder again.
Dr Wes Pearson is a research scientist at AWRI, who likewise makes white wine at a McLaren Vale store winery. He knows better than many that their work is cut out for them to make better NoLo red wine.
“We’re attempting to make a wine that looks and smells and tastes like standard wine, however it’s a healthy option,” he told Universe.
“Those that have been consuming red wine for 20 or thirty years … you’re not fooling them with the current products that are available.”
Part of the reason it’s so tricky to solve is because white wine is around 12% alcohol, compared to beer’s 5-6% alcohol. This higher percentage indicates the ethanol is a lot more popular in the way the white wine tastes and feels. Remove it, and the red wine suddenly isn’t truly red wine anymore.
“Ethanol provides a texture or viscosity. It makes the white wine thicker. There’s likewise a sensation of burning or heat that you obtain from ethanol,” says Pearson.
“Plus, beer has active ingredients. Red wine doesn’t have components– it’s just grape juice that’s been fermented. So, your tools to restore that mouthfeel which texture that you lose when you take the ethanol out [is significantly less than beer]”
Making NoLo red wine is done in the same way as beer, you can either utilize distillation or reverse osmosis. Nevertheless, maltose negative yeast strains aren’t useable for white wine because grape juice has lots of sucrose– which all yeast can quickly devour to develop into alcohol.
Utilizing just distillation, some white wines reasonable much better than others when ending up being NoLo. Pearson recommends that light gewurztraminer varieties like sauvignon blanc lose less of their flavour compounds than heavier reds.
“I’ll be the very first to admit, if you had a NoLo white wine five years earlier, and you had one today, today’s are miles and miles much better. So, we are making headway,” he states.
“There are some excellent sauvignon blancs what you wouldn’t even understand are low alcohol. In my viewpoint, the champagnes and the sauvignon blancs are most likely the closest currently to their standard equivalents.”
The expansion of NoLo wine in the last few years has been tremendous– according to White wine Australia NoLo production has grown 593% in between 2017 and 2021. Still, just 1% of grape wine intoxicated in Australia in 2021 was NoLo wine.
Pearson hopes that as NoLo red wine improves and the demand gets greater, it’ll not only be a larger market share, but likewise able to be sold at a similar rate point to regular white wine.
“These items, they’re actually pricey to make. You have to get the grapes, ferment them, keep them, and then you need to have this pricey technology to remove the ethanol. And after that you likewise lose volume!”
“You can head out and purchase an $1000 bottle wine tomorrow, but there’s no $1000 bottles of non-alcoholised red wine. There’s not a lot of premium items in this space.
“If we can fix the mouthfeel issue we can begin to make these wines look a lot more like standard wines, that opens up that entire realm of premiumisation.”