Wouldn't you just interrupt the fermentation process before it gets that high? Or add less nutrients for fermentation?

Yes. Also, the yeast strains are much less pure and will probably die sooner.

I'm not sure you get a full enough taste though. I've made low-alcohol beers with fewer grains and lots of hops and it was unbalanced, the base was not there.

I think this is the key point. We want something that tastes like a 21st century beer but otherwise with the properties of an 18th century beer.

That reminds me of Belgian beers which have double the alcohol of your regular beer but tastes like there is barely any alcohol.

Actually, my impression is that the main driver of that "alcohol free beer taste" is the absence of the taste of alcohol. I kind of want to test this hypthesis by adding pure alcohol to an alcohol free beer, but pure alcohol is not really something you find in the supermarket. Germany has a non-alcoholic drink called "Malzbier" (malt beer), which is basically the liquid you would ferment to make beer. It is _insanely_ sweet. So I would expect that a lightly fermented beer would be much closer to a sweet drink than to what we expect under the name "beer".

I have an experiment for you, pour e.g. a 0.5L Erdinger Weißen upside down and observe the resulting mess, then do the same with the 0.5% version of the same beer.

There's much less foam in low alcohol beers, so it's not just the alcohol content (unless that affect it directly in some way I don't know about).

As far as I understand a Hefeweizen is put into the bottle with live yeast, which continue the fermentation and create the characteristic thick foam. So indeed, in that case, you cannot have that effect without alcoholic fermentation.

But I am more of a Pilsener guy, and there are a few good alcohol free Pils which I am convinced would taste like the "real deal" with the added taste of alcohol.

All beer, historically, was bottled with live yeast. That's how you got the carbonation. Some times we cheat today.

Alcohol does change the surface tension so foaming will be different. Ever seen a security guard shake someone's water bottle to check if it's really water?

The thing that makes beer foam stay there is the protein content. Yeast contributes some, but it's also in the grain. The foam should be less different if you compared something filtered like Heineken and Heineken 0.0.

I can buy grain alcohol that’s 95% pure alcohol at my local liquor store. It might be kept behind the counter where I have to ask for it, but it is available.

Grain alcohol is illegal in many states. California restricts alcohol to 60%, for example, so you won't be able to find it in any corporate place, though you can occasionally luck out and find a bottle in a small liquor store that doesn't mind selling pseudo-legal things.

> So I would expect that a lightly fermented beer would be much closer to a sweet drink than to what we expect under the name "beer"

this is not a good expectation. Yeast will consume all available sugar till the alcohol %age gets too high for them (depends on the yeast but even the hardiest cultured strains poop out at around 16%. But they can only consume what sugar is in there, so if you ferment starting with something with little sugar, it will not arrive at a high alcohol level.

Our ancestors did not have access to lots of sugar, even their fruits (therefore juices) were less sweet.

to your point about insanely sweet starter, wine grapes are also insanely sweet, so sweet we don't want to eat them. Table grapes like you buy at the grocery, sweet as they are, are much less sweet than wine grapes. So, starting from the ultra sweet grapejuice, average wine gets to 12% alcohol.

> Actually, my impression is that the main driver of that "alcohol free beer taste" is the absence of the taste of alcohol.

I think it depends on the style. For hoppy ales Athletic Brewing in the US makes really good beers, you can hardly tell there is no alcohol. As far as I heard they don't really remove alcohol, but I don't know how they brew it. (Might be a secret process.)

Regarding German beers, this is also what I find near me now, and they are all decent, but you can definitely tell they don't have alcohol.

Athletic brewing is easily the best non-alcoholic beer I've had. They have less than .5% alcohol which makes me wonder if that little bit helps keeps the flavor profile correct.

I semi-regularly brew kvass, a [delicious] low alcohol content carbonated probiotic drink, and it's quite similar to beer:

- Toast 300g sliced [rye] bread to near burning

- Boil 3 liters of water, turn off, insert/soak bread

- Let sit for 6 hours

- Add 150g sugar, 6g instant yeast

- Let sit for 18 hours

- Remove bread, strain out extra liquid from it. Birds love it, once it dries out.

- Bottle up the liquid (leave headspace for gassing), and occasionally burp it.

- Wait. Longer bottling period = smoother, less carbonated, more alcohol, less sweet. ~12 hours, but this is very subjective.

- Chill + drink. Take the lid off very carefully, aim away from eyes.

What makes it probiotic? I don't see any addition of bacteria, other than yeast. I thought regular "probiotics" usually contain multiple strains of bacteria?

I suspect it’s the latter. The beers were nothing like the highly polished industrial lagers or ales of today.

In Finland, a home-made small beer (kotikalja) remains a popular drink in the countryside. The alcohol content is around 1%. It’s a sweet brown mush that you can make in one day at home using rye malt sold in every grocery store. Here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtgWBCnOt4M

Kotikalja is the Finnish version of kvas, which is ubiquitous across Eastern Europe.

There's a Tibetan/Bhutanese/north Indian barley version of this too, known as chhang.

Chhang generally reaches around 4-6%, but it is also a generic word for that fermented barley drink, so maybe other regions brew it at a lower ABV.

You can brew a 5% beer, then mix it 10:1 with water, and you'll get 0.5%.

It's not up to modern standards for "alcohol free" beecs, but it works if you're just aiming to hydrate while avoiding pathogens in your water supply.

But you just added 10x water from the questionable supply to your beverage.

Yes, but the alcohol kills the bacteria in the water

Is that true at 0.5%?

No, typically what made beer safe to drink was the boiling, not the alcohol.