Prepare your bottle openers, hops heads, it’s Nosh’s Beer Week 2024. All week long we are celebrating local brewers, taprooms and bottle shops, and the latest trends in beer. Check back each day this week for new stories on the East Bay’s unique, innovative and growing beer scene.
Ryan Frank, the VP of Operations and Head Brewer at Headlands Brewing, first tried Dry January a decade ago. He spent part of that first Dry January in Tahoe with his wife and he wanted something to drink after they were done skiing.
“How do you get off the mountain without a beer? But we were doing Dry January so we just found whatever we could,” Frank said. “My partner and I tried every single N/A beer we could get our hands on and the Erdinger Kristallweiss was my number one pick a decade ago.”
Since then, Frank says he’s seen the shift in drinking culture as more non-alcoholic beers have entered the market. Ten years ago, he felt that the pretty solid N/A beers at the time were coming out of Germany, which started making and developing N/As much earlier. It wasn’t until more and more people were drinking less in general, participating in Dry January, or the more recent addition, Sober October, or not drinking at all, that U.S. brewers started seriously working on developing their own. Frank has continued participating in some Dry Januarys since his first a decade ago.
“Even though I’m a professional brewer and I still taste beer in January, I tend to participate in Dry January,” Frank said. “To me, it’s a nice little healthy reset, it’s not even like I’m abstaining from alcohol for the rest of my life, it’s me better understanding my relationship with that and maintaining a healthier balance.”
Non-alcoholic beers are the fastest-growing segment of the beer industry, according to multiple brewers. The options have risen dramatically, especially with the big players in the industry like Connecticut’s Athletic Brewing which was founded in 2017.
While most breweries around the Bay Area are selling other companies’ N/As, Fieldwork Brewing is one of the only breweries in the East Bay making their own. They have three at the moment, a West Coast IPA, a hazy IPA, and a grapefruit blonde, with others in the works.
“Our goal is to make it so you can’t really tell and that’s what we’re hearing, that it’s ‘the best N/A beer I’ve had yet’,” Ian Gordon, the director of marketing at Fieldwork, said. “We compare ourselves a lot to Athletic and we want to make something better than they’re making.”
Fieldwork doesn’t usually distribute its regular beers beyond self-distributing in local areas, but it plans to widely distribute its N/A beers. They are currently available around Northern California, and Gordon said they are now entering Southern California and planning to keep expanding from there.
“There’s a demand for it,” Gordon said. “Or else we wouldn’t be doing it.”
Challenges keep small breweries from jumping in
John Gillooly, head brewer and owner of Brix Factory Brewing, said that Fieldwork, founded in 2014 and opening its ninth taproom location in Roseville late this year, is a larger brewery so it makes sense that they would want to sell only what they make themselves. For other breweries in the Bay, there are a few deterrents to making your own N/A beers including cost, demand, space, and food safety.
“While I think there’s a fun and interesting opportunity, I do think players who have been positioned well or have grown specifically with that as their niche, Athletic for one or really well capitalized breweries like Sierra Nevada are executing very well and at a scale where it’s widely distributed that it doesn’t seem like the best opportunity for Headlands to continue to expand our reach by adding that into our product mix,” Frank said.
Austin Sharp, the CEO of Headlands Brewing said that before the interview with Nosh, he checked the numbers to see how N/A beers were selling in Headlands’ two taprooms. Sharp said he would’ve guessed 3-5% of total sales were N/A beers, but in reality, they’re around 0.5-0.7% in both taprooms.
“But I still think, even given that, we have hard kombucha, we have ciders, we have wine, so we want to offer a little bit of everything to everybody,” Sharp said. “So even at 0.5% it’s not like we’d say they don’t serve a purpose. They do.”
Temescal Brewing put the sale of all its N/A drink offerings, not just its four N/A beer offerings, at 5% of total sales. The brewery is continuing to expand the options, but doesn’t foresee making its own N/A beer anytime soon.
There are multiple methods of making N/A beers, but the majority are made in one of two ways, Frank said. The first is to go through a relatively normal fermentation process but limit the amount of simple sugars that are produced and use yeasts that don’t create a lot of alcohol. The other method is to brew beer like normal but then remove the alcohol through either vacuum distillation or reverse osmosis, which is membrane filtration, and then add water back in. Zack Bassett, a brewer at Fieldwork, said they use a method closer to the first process.
Additionally, since these drinks don’t have alcohol, they are harder to make food safe.
“Alcohol, for all those problems at times, is a pretty good sanitizer and so there’s technically a lot more you need to worry about with N/A beers,” Sharp said. “There is, in my opinion, another level of critical eye that you need in terms of understanding HACCP and food safety if you’re going to remove one of those dynamics that inherently makes beer food safe.”
The way to make non-alcoholic beers food safe is to pasteurize them or heat them up to kill any living microbes. Due to the extreme heat in the pasteurization process, this can make any oxygen in the beer interact more with the beer’s other components, which can mute flavors, or with high levels impart a stale, papery flavor. Flash pasteurizing, which means pasteurizing before packaging, can add some oxygen into the beer. Tunnel pasteurizing, which is after packaging, doesn’t have this risk.
This food safety reason might also be why it’s rare to see N/A beers on tap.
“There’s another level of control that a large supplier wouldn’t have over a mom-and-pop bar to know that that beer continues to stay food safe,” Frank said. “So you do see a lot of N/A just being served, even if it’s on premise, right out of the can, where it has been stabilized, most likely through pasteurization.”
While no other breweries Nosh spoke to in the Bay Area make their own N/A beers, many were making their own hop water, which is an easier process. Hop water is basically a hop-flavored sparkling water. Stephen Ruddy, the brewer at Oakland United Beerworks, described his process for making its hop water.
“I’m using sterile water. I’m actually adjusting the pH to it, so I’m making it slightly more acidic so that when the hops go in, it doesn’t become something very caustic, something that’s unpalatable,” Ruddy said. Then they add around 30 pounds of hops to the tank. He boils the water but doesn’t make it like tea. Instead, the hops process cold on top of the sterilized water so that the flavor is imparted without much of the bitterness.
Finding the real beer flavor
While visiting Brix Brewing Factory for an interview with Gillooly, I also lucked into a surprise interview with Bassett, who had brought some cans of Fieldwork’s N/A beers for Gillooly to sample.
In general, Gillooly doesn’t quite understand the hype around N/As. He’d sold one earlier that day.
“We were talking earlier, I was like, ‘Who even buys these things?’ Then this lady came in, I’m just like: ‘Really? Because, wouldn’t you rather have a hop water?’” Gillooly said.
Gillooly brought out two N/A beers for a side-by-side taste test: a West Coast IPA from Ration Ale and Fieldwork’s Headliner, its N/A IPA.
After tasting both, the consensus was that Fieldwork’s was better because it tasted closer to a real beer. “This is actually quite decent,” Gillooly said.
After the taste test, Gillooly agreed to start carrying Fieldwork’s N/A IPA at Brix. He said that the N/A they moved on from, Ration Ale’s, had a little bit of a sweetness and he didn’t get the flavors of the hops well. Part of this, he said, may have been oxidation caused by the pasteurization. While Bassett said they also pasteurize the beer, they were able to keep those characteristics mostly out of this N/A beer.
“It’s mostly just got a big bittering charge and then we put flowable hop flavors in it afterwards,” Bassett said, describing the Headliner N/A IPA. They use hop distillates, which are oils extracted from hops. This way they can get the flavor of the hops without the full oxidative effects of the heat of pasteurization.
The hardest part of creating N/A beers is the flavor. Alcohol adds a flavor and a mouth feel, so taking it out has a real impact. It’s easier to replicate beers that were lower ABV to begin with, but Bassett and Gillooly said that people who want N/As are looking for the IPAs.
“They’re the people that miss that big hit me over the head IPA,” Bassett said. “It’s hard to make a big hit you over the head IPA in general, and then it’s hard to think about it without the alcohol.”
Across the brewers I spoke with, a common usage for N/A beers both by the brewers themselves and the customers they see in their breweries, is as a tool for moderation.
“I find it really helpful to have my last beer of the night be an N/A beer,” Frank said. “So it’s kind of like, I still want a beer, but I’ve got kids, and I don’t really need one more beer at the end of the night.”
N/A beers and drinks in general, are providing a tool for all types of people to enjoy nights out with friends without having to consume alcohol.
“Now almost nobody has an excuse not to hang anymore,” Bassett said.
