Greetings. Welcome to this very this first craft beer brewing wet live webinar on brewing with break side Berkeley yeast bring with non alcoholic yeast. I'm totally butchered that title already Tim and Anthony. I hope you guys forgive me on this one. This is something we've never done before thanks to all of you who are joining us live for this broadcast normally with with our craft brewing podcast. I have the benefit of editing before anything goes live. But we are just right out there. For all of you that are joining us, we've got comments going now. I see a bunch of them lining up here. If you have questions as we go, please throw them in there in the comments. I will keep monitoring those. We will go through this. We will also end the shoot for about an hour and then have Q&A open after that. Please stick around. If you have questions that don't get covered through all of the run of the webinar, then you can hold those to the end. We will try to answer everybody's questions and make sure everyone gets to learn. The idea here is for Ben to learn from Tim and from Anthony about non alcoholic brewing about methods processes, obviously yeast fermentation, etc. etc. And understand all the challenges and ins and outs of that before we get started a little bit introductions. Maybe we'll start with Anthony. Anthony is VP of product strategy for Berkeley yeast. Long time brewer, very experienced brewer. A number of different breweries. He can give you all of that history and background. I won't recount it here. Tim is brand ambassador for Berkeley yeast. Tim was most recently grew master co founder of seller maker. I joined Berkeley earlier this year to help lead up their content and brand ambassador stuff. Ben, Brewmaster for breakside. I also a Russell share award winner for innovation in brewing. If you I ask most brewers out there who they want to be when they grow up. The answer is Ben Edmonds. If you know, you know, I've had many GBA F winning brewers tell me that I want to be Ben Edmonds when I grow up. But for Ben, you were not necessarily a non alcoholic beer brewer and are interested in jumping into this and come at it from the standpoint of a brewer. You know, who's brewing 30,000 plus brewers a year, beer is a barrels a year in a production environment. And so for you, you need to not just, you know, understand the process, but also have a bullet proof approach to doing this non alcoholic beer impact. In a way that's going to be stable, it's going to be healthy. You know, it's going to last out there. And so in this sense, I will hand it over to you, Ben. And you can get this conversation started and pick the brains of Anthony and Tim to get an idea, you know, for where you start. So with that, I'll hand it over to Ben. And if anyone has questions as we go, throw them up in the comments. And I will, I will keep funneling them to Ben as we go. Awesome. Thanks for the introduction, Jamie. And it is a little bit unusual, I suppose, that the person kind of moderating this panel, this webinar is not someone who actually produces this type of beer, but it really is fun because I get to be a student and kind of pepper these guys, the questions that I'm always wondering about is N.A. production and low alcohol beer production is increased and become more central to our to the crafts segment of our industry. So fellas, let's just dive in. You know, this is a technical talk. It's not a marketing talk. It's not really about the business side of this. It's really nerd out on kind of a how to's and what nots and leave the questions around, you know, what the marketplace looks like for another conversation. But I think we're going to kind of hit this in two areas, right? We're going to talk about production and kind of N.A. is a whole and production. And then we're going to get into the food safety piece after that. Does that sound good? Sounds great. Great. All right. Taxonomy first. Tell me when you guys think, you know, what is this realm of N.A. How do we define it? What's the range of products that might be considered in this space? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of products that we could call non-alc. I think for this talk, it's probably best if we just focus on non-alc beer. So we're talking about malt hops yeast. We're talking about some amount of fermentation. We can we can discuss a little bit some different methods of making non-alc product. And maybe why we're going to focus on the maltose and maltatrios negative yeast space for this talk. So products that are under 0.5% ABV. It's if you're looking at maltose maltatrios negative yeast, it's a little challenging to get to that 0% mark. So we'll really be focusing on the under 0.5% product. Do you want to just put a little finer point on that difference between 0.0 type beers or products and this kind of range. It's considered non-alc but isn't that above 0.0 but below 0.5% process wise just how what the history is behind those types of differences? Yeah, so we'll start with a different methods of achieving non-alc first and then we can talk about 0.0 and 0.5. So you've primarily got mechanical methods of dalk so membrane or RO units or eat their malt methods rectification distillation. That I like to think of those as the goal is to make a fantastic beer and try to not mess it up through the alcohol removal process. You end up losing a lot of the favorable sensory attributes. Ethanol is a carrier of a lot of those awesome flavors that we have come to know and love and beer come from both the fermentation and the hops. So you tend to lose those through the process of alcohol removal. On the other hand, the sort of arrested fermentation or multi-stnegative approach to making NA I think is all together different. You're not making a normal beer to start with and therefore a lot of your considerations that go into producing that product are very different to begin with. And when you think about the removal process, you can in general remove close to all of the alcohol and in doing so, you can remove a lot of again, the flavor components with with multi-stnegative yeast or arrested fermentation. You have to get some amount of fermentation to get the character that we know in love and beer. So there's always going to be some amount of alcohol present. Great. And then today we're predominantly going to be focusing on that zero, the 0.5, 0.1, 0.001, or what are going to call it to 0.5 space. What do you see, either Tim or Anthony, is kind of the, from a production point of view, some of the advantages of working in the NA space compared to traditional beer fermentations. Me and for me personally, it's when you think about NA beer, it's, you have to approach it, not like normal strength beer. So honestly, it ends up being just kind of this new playground for us to mess around in. There's a lot of techniques that you would use in the beverage world to make flavors appropriate for an NA beer. So there is a lot of like bench trialing and things like that. And for me as a brewer, like I like experimentation, I feel like, you know, we've gained and learned so much over the past decade and brewing. And that kind of creative output is, it seems a little bit stagnant right now and NA is really kind of revitalizing that for me at least. Let's say some of the, some of the main operational benefits of approaching this from a yeast perspective is you don't have to invest in sort of the equipment inside. I think it can be challenging for folks to correctly gauge what their market presence is going to be like. So you kind of get one shot when you buy the equipment, you have a certain capacity that you're buying. And if you grossly over estimate what your, what your needs are, you're going to end up with, you know, a fancy stainless steel ornament in your brewery. Or if you grossly underestimate your needs, you're going to quickly sort of run out of the ability to sell to your customers, which means you're going to have to then look at signing another piece of equipment coming up with the capital, you know, decommissioning something that you've purchased to recommission something new. So it approaching it from, I guess, from a yeast perspective gives you the advantage of being able to both prototype in a low risk environment. But then also understand if this is something that is kind of right for you to continue from a, from a business perspective, it's, it's a very low risk way to approach exploration in the space. And these are, at least with our yeast, they are saccharomyces, right? So as brewers, we're very familiar with fermenting with these. They do different things than your typical say Chico or whatnot, but it's, it's, you know, you're still air raving your word, you're doing a mash, even though the mash framers might be different. We're making beer and it's, it's nothing too far outside the box at any brewer can't handle. Yeah, you know, I think from my perspective, like one of the, there's a number of business reasons or market reasons when we haven't really engaged in the NA space, one of which though that you point to Anthony's just the tremendous period of entry on a lot of these and by kind of the introduction of these multi negative yeast has really changed the game, the ability for practice playing this space in a way that's I think a little bit more like you said, kind of a, at the bench top or small bash level in a way that might be a lot more. We're the pair of entries lower, but there's still a lot of risks in there and I'm sure we'll get to the safety piece, like I said, if the in the second half of this. But, you know, I think that in one of the reasons that I got on board to host us after talking with you guys about your these new yeast that you've been working on is that, you know, historically, a lot of any beer just simply not very good at the end of the day as a quality product. And I think about it when I take the marketing hat off and I take all the kind of other questions just to enjoy this beverage is a lot of it's quite sweet, quite oxidized doesn't really have the trappings of beer and tasting the beers made with your all's yeast. That was one of the first experience I'd had with anything other than a mechanically separated type but zero or really, you know, high barrier to entry type in a beer where I had it and said, oh wow, this actually has a lot of the trappings of beer. And you guys have kind of been able to engineer that into into that. So I think that's creating another open door another open opportunity for craft brewers. Do you guys want to talk about kind of why you think the yeast or a game changer in some ways or do you want to do you feel like we kind of just get on some of those key points there. I guess I'll briefly I'll briefly talk about a lot of what we are also going to talk about in this in this webinar will be applicable to all multistegative yeast strains but I think that the point that we would like to get across is that our yeast put you in a position to do all these things very simply. Are yeast when I talk about our yeast like to say it does three things the first thing is it's a saccharomycy strain like Tim just mentioned. So it's it does all the normal things that you would expect a saccharomycy strain to do there are a lot of other multistegative options that either are not saccharomyces or have been hybridized with non saccharomycy strains. So you might get other flavor components that you're not used to seeing in standard beer. The second thing that we have done besides eliminating the ability to ferment maltose maltatreos is that we increase beer flavors. So we're talking about a reduced level of fermentation which also reduces all of the fermentation flavors and aromas. So we've taken sort of the benchmark of normal fermentation and what you would otherwise see a really large reduction we brought those sensory compounds back up to where you would expect to see them. So you get a lot of as you said the trappings of normal beer like you you get that. And then the third thing that we've done in terms of flavors is we brought in things that you would also find typically in beer coming from other ingredients like hops. So you get some tropical notes you get some classic hop compounds. So all those things together I think are an amazing place to start with the rest of the sort of tips that we are going to go over here and the rest of the webinar. That work flavor is it's it's not something that we fully understand of where exactly it comes from. So there are some chemical compounds that we have some idea but with so little fermentation. Even if you can get past the word aroma it just doesn't smell like beer in any way and that's why it was the yeast the NA classic and the NA cabana which are the two yeast we sell. They were actually the first two samples I brought home when I joined Berkeley these they hadn't tried them yet. And I actually liked those better than a chico fermented same word stream so it was like 2.5% alcohols that 0.5. But they've got such great just kind of beer character that make them extremely unique and I haven't seen that with any of the other NA's yet. So I think the second is talking about what some of those beering metabolites that you are turning up in the kind of genomic engineering on these uses and what the also some of what those hot compounds are. Yeah so unsurprisingly esters are a great marker for fermentation. So focusing on that class of compounds and then also you'll you'll see terpenes or you'll see potentially files. There are we'll just call it a handful of of things that we're adding to kind of make these nudge them in the right places. But it's yeah it's all it's all compounds and flavors that you would see typically in beer. Great. Let's all right let's dive into some of the nuts and bolts here. What let's start a big picture recipe design. What's the kind of you know what are the key starting points or how do you crawl into this before you can really really really run in this space. Yeah I oftentimes like to speak very simply about like the first beer that you produce for multis negative yeast and the reason I do that is you likely have thousands and thousands of iterations of standard alcohol beer and you can draw on all those experiences to very quickly kind of determine what you want to do in the space. Writing your you know 200th IPA recipe is not a challenge for people but thinking about making a five plate of starting gravity beer all the sudden you have to really reconsider the rest of the balance of the product. So I generally like to recommend a very very simple recipe starting with like five to five and a half plate O. G. And as I mentioned you'll reduce maybe like to you'll you'll ferment 15% RDF or so so you'll take that down point nine play dough. And you'll have a product that's born non alcoholic beer no extra work required there are some things that you can do like more advanced methods you might be adding water back to get to an appropriate level of a. Maybe but it's best to save those after you have tried and potentially failed a few times before you try and do the hard tricks in the space. I think that's really important and we've seen with customers who have used the yeast who have kind of just got a got ahead of themselves a little bit here and there and I got a stress what Anthony says it's like. We'll give you a baseline recipe that we use for our pilot system. I would start there I would replicate that as best as possible and then make minor tweaks from there. There are two recipes up on the website on the crap your in brewing website right now that you put together to him is that right. I did yeah thank you those are. The iterations of the pilot recipe they're not that far off ones kind of a light logger once more of a west coast and IPA. And you can kind of see just by looking at those the where you might go with like subtle differences and malls and tops. Going back to like the broad strokes so we've created a really low play though work the fermentation to get you know that 15% RDF that happens in 12 to 36 hours so very quickly for men's and then you're looking to package the product and again thinking broad strokes if you've made a very simple recipe up front Tim alluded to this earlier. So you've given yourself a lot of opportunity to bench top down the road and what I what I mean by that is. You can make hundreds of different versions of non alcoholic beer with the same fermentation with a lot of the products that you can use downstream you can change. A whole bunch about the color about the flavor you can change change sweetness it gives you the ability to learn through experience and through failure you don't have to show anyone the 99 versions that you made that were not good. But it will help inform you for batch to you ferment here are the things that I want to adjust and I want to improve to make it a better product so you can quickly get through the prototyping phase if you keep it simple at the beginning. Yeah the idea that some of those prototypes can be ready in you know 24 hours 36 hours is pretty tempting compared to the normal turnaround time for the normal feedback loop for a full strength beer let's let's talk about mall if I'm getting into this you guys. You guys have kind of proposed a five play though five and a half play though starting gravity we're looking at something that's been from that down to point nine so we're in the mid fours at the end. I'm trying to do a say a hot four even a simple you know logger type wrist bill here you said Anthony I've written 200 of these IPA recipes before how am I changing how I approach writing an IPA recipe for an NA version of that beer. Yeah I think probably the biggest change is how you think about hops in general both from the flavor and aroma component and the bitterness component without alcohol in the product it really changes both of those things the perception and the types of flavors and rumours that you get out of hops so I like to lean into hot side hops as much as I can because I think they come off. Authentically because the hot side process is largely similar to what you would do for standard beer. However, I like to keep my be use quite low to keep the balance of the product in check if you send out an NA product that's got you know 60 plus B use it's not going to be very easy drinking so so reducing the B use is super important and then on the cold side from a hot thing for spec. And from a hot thing perspective you know we. Anthony you say that you mean using products or you talking about using actual hop material. Pop material is fine hot products are also welcome hot products in in the hot side or downstream cold side. There are a lot every manufacturer of hops and a bunch of people who don't grow hops have hot products that are available that you can use to to great effect in my experience I like to I like to join those together with real hops I think they play nicely together. But yeah you can use those hot or cold side on the cold side in particular you are opening yourself up to to micro risk using hops in like a typical dry hop fashion. But I also think the character from. Ops use cold side in NA is very is more similar to that in say hop water where maybe you get different components it does not come off authentically dry hopped I think there's something special about alcohol in beer and the hop flavor in a room with that you get so I usually reduce by a significant amount the amount of cold side hops that I'm using and you still can get. Amazing flavor from that but again you couple that with advanced hot products you can get some very flavorful IPAs in the NA space and we all know that the advanced hot products out there now are just getting better and better there's more and more options I spend a few days trying a whole bunch of them just to see you know from weed terpenes to hop extracts to like hop. Blends mimicking hop flavors natural flavors pineapple mango peach these things are like at low threshold levels really add to that hop bouquet a really nice way and they don't overwhelm the palette like Anthony mentioned because yeah you need that ethanol you need that body to kind of temper the views temper the stringency that you get from the hops. And that's a you know I think there's a point there in their team also which is that the expectation around what hop flavors are present and what might seem like a hop flavor and this may be different than what we're used to in typical IPA or pale ale production. I want to backtrack to the second go back to molten mass here is a good kind of through line on the on the hops you know we mentioned wording is the beginning I know wateriness on the flip side of that is kind of an issue here Tim from your perspective you know malt wise what are some of the things. That you know might either what are the tips and tricks for avoiding that those twin challenges and the navigating this twin twin threats of wateriness and wordiness well I think it's important to keep it simple. You know it's it's easy to make lighter color beers seem more authentic whereas if you were to try to create a stout you'd very quickly overwhelm the palette with the esterency and roast of darker moths. So if I'm getting into the NA space on the mash side of things I'm going to try to probably stay in the in the world of lighter beers first of foremost. But we've realized is American to row it's a great place to start it it performs the way you expect to you get the amount of glucose you're looking for. For example we had a brewery recently that and I totally understand why they did this but they did about I think 70% Maris order as their NA buskish IPA base and and of course they would right they're trying to build up the body a little bit maybe if so it's not as flabby. And we don't know that this is why this happened but they had a lot less fermentation and there just might not be as much glucose in that Maris order from the Malten process because we're not really getting glucose from mashing per se it's kind of what's already naturally present in the malt itself that's why we're mashing at 160 or so we we can release as much malt as as we want that's not going to get fermented with the malt those negatives it's really just minimizing glucose. Yeah so that's an interesting point like you want to minimize glucose because you don't want to have because that's what the yeast is actually taking up you also don't want to little glucose is what you're saying. You want to get the exact amount of glucose to get to 0.5% ABV because you want you want fermentation characters so you need to have you need to make it to 0.5. So run through a quick wrist bill that you might put together for you know your basic tabletop bench top trial here. Yeah I mean I think our pilot recipe here is an Anthony can correct me if I'm wrong but about 70% American 2 row 20% wheat for some body and head retention and then a little bit of carapels as well for some body very straightforward. Yeah you could 20% wheat is very helpful the anything that increases the thumb ability and thumb stability of the product is super helpful you can imagine at a 5 play to work you're missing a lot of the thumb positive proteins that you would otherwise get from a standard beer. So leaning into wheat and carapels or carahel if you want a little bit more color super helpful to make the product feel more beer like at the end of the day no one wants kind of a much more pale and no foam product at the end of the day needs to needs to look like beer if if people are going to enjoy it. What type of wheat are you guys for it I would eat. Sorry I was wondering you guys mentioned wheat a couple of times we're talking multi wheat torified unmulted what's the what's your preference here. Multid white wheat is what we use as in our typical typical pilot recipe. And if you're looking for head retention and you have the SOP for it I would even say back off on your B use a little bit and use some. I summarized ask of health acids. But you can add those in later. Sorry it's not I summarize that class it's. Thank you. Is is crystal malt is out of fashion and NA is this in I think. It kind of is I. I would. I think you can use a lighter crystal. It's possible but it also does. And I think the main character is is kind of the main sort of enemy in the NA space and. You'll find between wordy and oxidation. There's just like. There's a lot of overlap between some of the negative attributes that people call out so. I like to avoid that to start out so that you can get a pretty good understanding of what a baseline is. I think there's plenty of space to do that but. I think it's. I think it's tough to nail that right out of the gate is what I would say. And maybe I mean correct if I'm wrong but maybe it's not so much an issue. A concern with like non fermentability or what it's doing for the kind of body and gris but actually more toward what then will happen to post pasteurization how those kind of. And then the degradation of products might kind of present in the in the finished an A beer right. Yep exactly. Alright so simple mash bill we're in the grid in the in the mash water tonne here. Short and fast what's the next what's the match look like. Yep and quick since we're not really concerned with with the enzymes at this point we're just trying to extract what exists. So we can move through the process pretty quickly and you can add a benefit by going hot and fast so a lot of times I suggest starting at the 160 Fahrenheit mark and maybe go for 10 minute rest and then mash off. I've seen people have success coming in much lower and immediately mashing off I've seen people come in. So you can find there are quirk staff everyone's brewing system you can find success at a number of different places but I guess the main consideration here is that the enzyme that does create glucose. So I think that is is I think teenager about one 65 so anytime spent below 165 you are potentially making more glucose which might potentially lead you to ferment more and then have to add water. So if you want to keep it simple go hot and fast and the. So the next thing that I would consider playing around is is what that does for the residual mouth feel so if you keep a lot of these bigger dextrins you might change and impact the mouth feel and the sweetness of the finished product whereas if you extend your rest a little bit more you push things more towards maltose. So you get a different mouth feel you get different sweetness and you potentially also open yourself up to more risk because now you have more for menable product for other off target organisms so by keeping it a little bit more complex in terms of the sugars on the hot side you might give yourself a little bit of extra benefit from a risk perspective and this goes. So both from a risk perspective and from a sensory perspective I like to say there's no silver bullets and non alch brewing it's just a million golden BBs so all of these little things that you can do to stack up in your benefit of creating a product that is at the end of the day both shelf stable and tastes good you kind of want to just take the opportunity to do all those little things. So it's kind of like just timing on the mash goes are you able to mean given that you're leaving a ton of maltose and and maltose trials behind presumably there's other starts behind are we able to pass an iodine test on this or is this something that's just you just kind of got a role with it with a time with a timer. I don't think there's any reason to even test for iodine like there's no. The purpose is is kind of moot so i'm not sure if you if you pass but I think you just go on time and then and ferment and you'll you'll see where you ended up. In my mind I almost think about mashing an a beer as more of like almost when you're home brewing and you're steeping the bag of grains just get some flavor you know you're you're you're you're looking more almost for that flavor and side products of the malt and you would typically normal normal strike beer. And this is maybe less germane to the actual production of an a beer but you know what's the have you guys tested what the kind of max level of glucose you're seeing if you do this five plate of word you know sorry this five plate of grist and. Run it with the pilot recipe to talk about like how if I if I mash it 144 and let it set for an hour and then did a full step mash up and how much fermentability would there be. I mean you can add enzymes and make the whole thing for menable there's so any range from about 5 12 to 15% and there actually even some things that you can do to decrease the glucose as as Tim said there are also other enzymes that turn glucose into things like gluconic acid so there are there are ways for you to really push this in any direction again the more advanced steps. But I yeah I would consider sticking ahead of yourself though. I would consider saying just keep it simple. I would consider sticking to sort of the 10 to maybe 17 or 18% RDF range to start out with. So don't worry about reducing glucose is what you're saying also in that. At least not for your first several batches. Anything else you guys want to hit on in terms of kind of mashing grists water profile water ability on this yeah absolutely. So we haven't actually it's crazy we're 35 minutes in and I haven't said anything about pH yet. But this is like the first step that you start paying attention to to your pH so because you have a much smaller grist you also have much lower buffering capacity of the malt. You also if you are sticking with normal liquor to grist ratios you will have much larger amounts of water that you're sparging so you see where this is going but you're. You're a mass pH or your sparge pH your runnings are going to go up which means you're going to extract less desirable things from your malt so I like to increase the amount of water and my liquor to grist ratio go pretty loose for the mashing which also gives me an opportunity to add more acid in and again we're not interested in stabilizing the enzymes so we don't need to hit our typical mass pH. We can drop that down a little further and give ourselves more space to get it right so increase the water add more acid than you think you normally would like don't be afraid to be in the five range. I like to use phosphoric acid on the hot side. I actually like to use it throughout the process to make the impact for pH driving the pH change and then you can experiment with different sorts of acids for sensory reasons downstream. But those that's probably the biggest sensory impact that you can or sensory item you can consider during mashing the other thing that I would think about is from an equipment perspective. You probably haven't run a five plate or through your louder tone before and you might have a bed that's you know a centimeter deep so maybe depending on your equipment if you're so lucky to have a nice wide louder time. You might need to add so like rice holes or something to bulk it up a little bit so that you actually cover your plates. But that's kind of all dependent on what equipment you have and what you have access to. And the circle back to pH one more thing on that if you are you're going to be at a low level lower than your typical year no mash pH is going to be your work knockout pH might be quite a bit lower than your use to when you're at least when you're going into the kettle. That's all good. The food safety concerns that we'll get to soon we're going to want low pH throughout this whole thing. So if you're you know going into the kettle and oh my god boil start is 4.5. Great that's actually like kind of as high as you want to be. So I would say don't freak out about pH is that are lower than you're used to seeing. And you're not seeing any any negative flavor impacts from lower pH is going to be typical at those points during the process and in full strength beer production. No and I think I think the lower pH helps these beverages. I think in general they taste better at lower pH anyway. Well just keep things moving along here fellas for the sake of time since we spent the first 30 38 minutes on this on on the mash and lottery let's get to the backside of the hot side that is the kettle and whirlpool some transfer we've hit on some of the kind of key hot notes but you look like you know I'm assuming here standard boil lengths we're trying to apply some undesirables as normal. You guys mentioned the views let's go back into that a little bit how low are we talking in terms of views. Can you quantify that at all in terms of hot load. Jamie you were asking Anthony about you know t90 the product mix so I'd be interested in hearing what that actual hot bill looks like. For the views and in hops on the hot side of general and this can be applied to cool size well is really be thoughtful about your hot choice make sure you're using hops that are really fresh. I would say keep the HSI on whatever hop you're using low there's not much the high behind on these beers so harsh bitterness. You know it high HSI something like a centennial might stick out more than it would in a normal beer. And you know having a lower pH to in the kettle is going to help you kind of keep your be used down to as well. And then do you think that there's a is there a space for kind of flowables and whatnot you know advanced products in these types of beers on the hot side or is that. version 2.0 would you suggest sticking to some t90 just for the for the first round when someone's getting dipping their toe into this. Yep I'm I've used you know there are hot products that will add flavor and aroma without adding bitterness those can work fantastically here. Again I think like you said starting simply early sticking to t90s pushing it late on the hot side so that you can get as much sort of aroma as you can out of them while keeping the be use low is is probably the best approach. You know if you're making an IPA starting in the neighborhood of 30 be use isn't unheard of like that feels too low for a west coast and IPA don't worry about it like like to mention you can always bump up some be used downstream and get an idea of what it tastes like with higher level of bitterness without necessarily committing your whole batch to that level of be use. I think that from my perspective just even thinking about you know what a hot bill might look like. You know one thing we've learned in low ebb like session IPA is not over the use that you know as those I be used dropped closer to 25 certainly below 40 but especially toward 25. You know they seem to be a lot more stable right your work view to finish beer change is a lot less traumatic than in a high. I wonder if here that's even exaggerated further by the absence of other ethanol and other by products you know that like 17 be use on a point five percent beer is the equivalent of you know 60 be use 4x or something like that on a 6% beer and it seems like that would just be but those be use would be a lot more permanent and less likely to drop out a solution with dry hopping or additional products etc. I think commercial examples that I've had mostly have been over bittered so far I think it's going to take a good amount of bench topping to figure out trial and error to figure this out. It's yeah there's just something happening there where your beers not standing up to those be use and I think that's actually my number one complaint about them typically is the hopping just seems kind of all over the place so I think downstream products are probably you're going to want to lean into them sooner than later because they're not going to give you that bitterness. In my conversation with you guys to leading into this we talked about you know avoiding dry hopping because of microbial risk because of the risk factors involved there so it seems like there's this also you guys have kind of advocated for a non traditional hop in the kind of favors late kettle maybe some world pool but not cool pool hopping you can talk about what you're trying to affect with that idea. Anthony you want to take other sure yeah I think it's back to what I said be of hops being authentic on the hot side so getting the most bang for your buck like if you are limited in the amount of cold side hopping that you can do take full advantage of the safety of the hot side and get as much authentic aroma and flavor as you can without causing imbalance in terms of be use that's just the general approach that I suggest and we can I don't know if it's if it's ripe to talk about cooling at this point and kind of the rest of the process and the food safety aspects but you once you leave the safety of the hot side you are you're squarely in the food safety danger zone. You have anyone who's worked in commercial kitchen of any sort knows that you know food from 40 F to 140 F is the area in which microorganisms can double it's kind of the food temperature danger zone your beer at this point is no different you have a nutrient rich medium and an organism that we have pitched maltotrios and maltose negative yeast. That will only eat a portion of the nutrients available so you kind of want to move through the fermentation temperature phase as quickly as possible to cool the product down so that like a whole host of other products that can be food safety risks when they're warm there less risky when they're cold you refrigerate milk to keep it from going bad we're kind of moving in the same direction with the beer at this point so we like to we'll talk about aeration a rate normally. ferment at 68 degrees or so with these particular e-strings and if you are going to use cold side products of any sort you can consider a couple more golden babies to add to your to your process here you can add more acid to help give yourself protection so. The pH drop that you will see coming out of fermentation might be something like 0.6 to 0.7 if you need to move further so if you want to get underneath. 4.2 which puts you in a really good spot you can consider adding your acid first and then adding another product on top of that you can consider cooling the tank down before you add your other product if your. beverage allows for the use of typical preservatives you can add those as well like those aren't going to protect you broadly against all organisms but they will help you against some organisms i think it's like worth noting that your house yeast is an off target organism at this point right like if that gets into these fermenters you're going to keep fermenting and you're going to have product that's over 0.5% ABV so really anything else that makes its way into those tanks. Is a risk for you so adding hops soft crash or on the day of cooling is much more beneficial than say adding hops at the beginning of fermentation there are all sorts of things that you can do to increase your risk of making beer that you like to drink. Through the use of temperature. Any kind of seller touches changes to SOPs changes to cleaning regimes CIPs that you guys recommend in advance of pitching in one of these multi trials multi trials negative ease. I think obviously sanitation cleanliness is important brewing no matter where you are but. With the food safety concerns of these beers I think this is a perfect opportunity if your company is getting into the NA space now's the time to really go over your SOPs now's your time to really do a group training on how your SIP and how CIP goes. You know is our people attaching hoses to the tanks the proper way grabbing the gas gets the proper way I mean any little touch could be a vector for bacterial load and so you know a 24 hour you know eight hour shift training period where we're just kind of going over the basics one more time. I've worked on enough breweries of collaborative enough breweries that you know these things can get a little wishy washy over time and it's fine because beer has alcohol but this does not this is very low so now's the time to make sure that everyone's on the same page. What about any type of stabilizers or additional kind of acid additions acid stabilization chemical stabilization anything you guys kind of recommend. Other than pastization courses will get to in a second here. Well you know pH is a very strong antimicrobial weapons so we we do know that if you're down at about 3.8 your beer is somewhat safe against pathogens. We are still highly recommending pastization for our products but if you were to you know let's say go slightly rogue and say you know what I trust my SOPs and and I'm going to I think I can make a safe product that's not going to hurt anyone. I would make sure to be adding plenty of acid to your beer whenever choice you want Anthony brings up the fact that he likes to mess around with various acids to kind of get different mouth feels and an innocent. Effects but I would be sub 4.0 for sure if not 3.8 or lower and now that might mess with the balance of the beer but what's better a little bit off balance or beer that's not as safe. One thing that I think on the celery side of this that you know you guys mentioned is you don't want to crash these beers quite as hard you want to to kind of the snafu that can come from this that. Yeah you don't want to you don't want to make make ice beer it's it's certainly something that people have easily overlooked you're just on autopilot you just chill your beer. So you want to stick to I don't know 36 or so something in that range so that you're you don't have the alcohol there to prevent from making ice. But just kind of answering answering your question a little bit more in terms of any other seller processes that you would consider like fresh fresh clean on all equipment this this doesn't follow normal beer through any process line again for the reason of potentially picking up your house. Me popping sweat!IX you'll just... You can't do it in private expensive food yeah I don't know when I'm going back here I but I want to see you some other business in my life on There's also an emergency in my home app Australia sets you up for a stable product. But if you're in the bright tank for a little bit of extra time, while you bench top and figure out what you ultimately want to do with this, as long as you're cold, you're in a pretty good position. In terms of, you know, we touched on it a little bit, but there are plenty of resources and people available that can help you vet alternative processes to pasteurization. Process authorities out there, they are well equipped to help you understand if your process and it meets the food safety requirements for you to be having safe product out there. Yeah, I would like to just make sure it's clear that when we talk about pasteurization as the gold standard, we're talking mostly about tunnel pasteurization, also batch pasteurization. We want the product to be in the package when it's being pasteurized. If you are doing flash pasteurization, it's better than nothing, but of course, it's going to be touches after flash pasteurization. That's going to be happening before it's packaged. So just keep that in mind and not think that that's a silver bullet of any type. I think we're starting to kind of merge into this really important piece of the puzzle here, which is the food safety side. Is there anything else before we kind of fully go into that in terms of hops, in terms of cellar touches that you guys want to kind of put a bow on? Just one thing, I know that we recommend pitching our use at 1.5 million cells per degree plate over a milliliter. It sounds like kind of a high rate, but that's because we want to rip through fermentation so fast. Again, if the tank's cold in 24 hours, 48 hours, we've done a really great job of protecting that beer. So just wanted to, if people are on our website and they see these numbers and wondering why it's so high, that's why. I, this sort of bleeds into the food safety aspects, but carbonation, if your beer is a little bit warmer and you haven't had a ton of fermentation to begin with, carbonating your product is going to be a little bit different depending on how, you know, if you have inline carbonation, you might want to pay close attention to that. Also sort of through the packaging process, if you're relying on foam to purge out headspace of your container, you will have to make some considerations to what that looks like, especially if you haven't done anything to maybe increase the foam stability. So just extra attention to those details is helpful. And I think in general, I prefer these products to be higher levels of carbonation to begin with. So closer to like the three range, anything that you can do to help people get the idea of fermentation and give you all the, all the cues that you're drinking of fermented product is super helpful. It also helps carry the aromas that you have made and took time to put into the product to people's noses. So as the added benefit of giving you some extra benefit from the food safety perspective, so higher levels of carbonation that's alcohol, acid, carbonation, all these things help keep the products stable long term as well. Great. All right, well let's, I'm starting to see over here in the comments here, a lot of food safety questions around pasteurization around, the practicality of achieving all this and what the baseline standards are. So let's run through from your guys top level view here, what's the pecking order? Where do you start with food safety on the backside of these beers and where should we focus first and then from there on down the ladder? I think the easiest thing to do, the best way to protect yourself is through the batch or tunnel pasteurization that just provides the broadest, the broadest amount of safety for you. If you're unable to do that, the other things that I would consider super high priority are both pH, to mention some fantastic targets to shoot for, carbonation being at about three, gold chain. You know, there are plenty of products out there that have no stabilization and will spoil quite readily when they're outside of a cold chain. And if you're able to maintain and prove that you have a cold chain for your beverage, I think as long as you've taken care to make sure that you haven't picked up any off target organisms along the way, you can do great with cold chain. But it does require a level of air and information that we don't typically require people to have in brewing. So not everyone has a passive program. If you, you know, everyone is following good manufacturing practices. So that's, that's table stakes. But if you have a passive program, I would consider applying the same approach to your non-alcoholic products. And you'll find some other areas that become critical control points for you. And just because you might have a tunnel pasteurizer in a house doesn't already mean that something's growing in your beer and there's pathogens in there that have released some toxicity. That's that's just something, you know, just because you're killing them later, it doesn't mean that they could hurt someone from what they've already done in their beer. Is, you know, this is maybe we've talked about pasteurization. Is, does that take draft off the table in your desipinion? We highly recommend not pouring drafts in a beer. I don't care how clean your bar is. You're sending those kegs out to other accounts that we can just, it's hard to keep tabs on. I just did a video on safety that went live on YouTube a couple days ago. And one of the stats I found while researching that is that brews association recommends cleaning draft lines, normal strike draft lines every two weeks. But hardly anyone ever does that, according to them. An A beer lines, you would want to do one week. So I just think the risk reward on serving draft beer is just not something that I would ever take a chance on. And it seems like customers are already accustomed to drinking a packaged product when it comes to an A beer. Jim, you noted just a second ago that even if you pasteurize at the end, these, you could already have achieved some level of toxicity. What is this time frame for creating potential toxicity from bacteria along the process? You applaud that it can be pretty short period of time. It depends on the bacterial load. I think if you are, if you're paying attention to these things, the chances that like something like E. coli could grow to a level that it would release enough endotoxins to kill someone, probably not likely, but that's not to say it isn't. And so getting your beer cold as fast as possible is going to highly lower that risk. I think one of the things that I'll chime in there on is, I went into this past world-brewing congress last summer in Minneapolis really wanting to see a thing a lot about an A beer. There were a lot of presentations that were finally drilling down onto this pathogens and the toxicology question. A lot of it was hearsay and species and hadn't really been dug into. And if anyone's interested, there's a number of presentations that are available on the MBA or SPC websites that speak to this issue about the actual ability to grow pathogens in a beer and an A beer environment in an A beer media. And so it is real. And I think the draft question is, it's going to be very controversial over the next few years. And it's going to be a real sticking point and there's going to be people on both sides of this issue as it were. Well, for example, there was a great MBA podcast recently that was talking about an A beer and the growth of pathogens in it. I'm going to sum it up as fast as possible here, but Dr. Greg was shown. Camden P. B. R. I basically showed that he ordered 50 different examples of European and A beers that he could just order over the internet, 50 different ones. None of them were found have pathogens in them. But then when I believe what he did was he had calculated them and put them put them into his hood. And so once the beers were open, the carbonation was leaving and oxygen was coming in, the pathogens were then allowed to grow. So why am I talking about that? Well, that's draft beer lines for you. You know, there's ingressive oxygen, right? There's lack of flintliness in general. So I think it's something we just should avoid at all costs right now. Yeah, absolutely. What, you know, pasteurization is obviously an expensive endeavor to get into for a lot of folks. What have you guys seen that's been effective for small brewers? I think batch pasteurization is a perfectly great way to do it. I know some breweries who have batch pasteurizer that are already using them for pastry stouts and things like that. And again, if you're worried about investing in tunnel pasteurization or batch pasteurization, it's not just NA beer that you can affect by this. You could go and backseeding beers of all types and people love sweet beer. So you're, you're, you're, the one you're making a sweet beer that's safe, but also you're benefiting and you can get into the NA world and be safe as well. Yeah, I would say as, as people think about approaching that, you, you can still prototype without a tunnel pasteurizer. So you can make small batches yourself and you know, you can, you can taste them right out of the tank if they're, if they're things for just yourself, you know, it's very low risk if you've done your diligence through the process. If you are, you know, packaging those up and you want to see what those are like across a longer shelf life, you can do the batch pasteurization, simply grabbing a sous vide or some sort of temperature controlled water bath, you can pasteurize these for your own prototypes and see how they hold up. And I think that's probably a really good place for people to start. And if they're getting results that they like, taking it to the next step would be considering, hey, if I'd like to do this in house myself, should I consider grabbing, you know, a batch pasteurizer that does two cases at a time, you know, there are companies that make these things that are essentially glorified dishwashers that put out hot water and can pasteurize two cases at a time. And you can, you know, you can service a pub with a product like that. That might, that might be enough for you to make the decision then to say, hey, I either want to own something more robust myself or I've built up a little bit of demand. I need to take this to somebody else who has a tunnel pasteurizer to make a larger amount of product for me. So I think there's a whole bunch of ways for people to continue to play in the space without having a full blown tunnel pasteurizer of their own. And I think, you have to, thanks for bringing that up because now's a good time just to mention, we are fully on board with helping whoever wants to get into the space with more info. This webinar is a great resource, but if you just want to reach out to us, Tim at BerkeleyEast.com or Anthony at BerkeleyEast.com, we can answer these questions, we can sit down with you, we can help. Yeah, and I think it's, I think it's a perfect thing for a small brewery to consider. When I was talking about earlier about finding this as a new space to kind of experiment in, I'm really excited about it. If I had the budget for a small batch pasteurizer, I think it's something that I would definitely go looking for the market. Do you guys want to get into pasteurization units or is that too thorny an issue and to multilater an issue for the time that we have on this? It's pretty multilayered, but if you, people that receive beer samples from BerkeleyEast, then made on our pilot system, pasteurized in a batch pasteurizer, like I've just described, those products are in excess of 50 BUs, that's what we're shooting for. I think it all depends on your, the load of organisms that you're pasteurizing, the product that you're making, what other steps you've taken throughout the process to help reduce your risk. But again, that's something that a process authority would be a great resource on. You can do challenge tests on different scenarios of your specific product and they can tell you, hey, this is working or this is not working. So, yeah, beyond that, we are an open book to share the things that we're doing, but everyone has to sort of make their own decisions about their level of risk that they're willing to take on and what they want to serve their consumers. Do you just want, maybe, since we're not going to get into the specific numbers over than your own, do you want to just kind of go into maybe why it's hard to give a standard on what a PU should be for these types of years? Sure. So, I mentioned it depends on the load. If you have, if you have a huge amount of microorganisms and your product, I guess, it's challenging to outline all the different scenarios that might exist. Whether that be the composition of your NA product in general, if you choose to add a whole bunch of sugar on top because you want it to be the sweetest non-acolic beer that existed in the market, you've just added a whole bunch of extra risk to your product. Yeah, I guess the amount of things to consider is quite wide, which is why when someone like a process authority evaluates for you, they look at your specific formula and your specific process to evaluate the total risk. Great. Well, guys, we've got about 25 minutes left in this and I think that I've asked most of the questions that I had and I think covered, you know, kind of front to back a lot of the really key issues here, but I'm sure we have a ton of questions that have not been answered that are coming from the audience. So, I'm going to hand it back over to Jamie so he can feed those to you, but thanks so much for that kind of broad strokes overview, really cool stuff. And yeah, it's a really fascinating area for exploration. Thanks. Thank you, Ben. Cool. I'll get a question started off just with something on back on the creative side a little bit. Had some health stuff happen early last year and went through a phase of not drinking a lot of beer and drinking a lot more non-acolic beer in a way that I had never engaged with the category before January 2024, but then got a really good crash course and what makes non-acolic beer good, palatable, interesting. You mentioned this like four-plato body and then finding balance in that texture becomes a big part. And I think as I was trying to get out with some of those hops questions earlier, hops, you know, providing texture to this to give it a berry flavor. You know, as you mentioned Anthony, adding hot side hops with, you know, so that there's a little bit of the cook top flavor rather than just raw hop flavor also adds to the perception of beeriness. Are there other creative tricks that you all use or that you have seen employed by other brewers to build more of the beer idea to the flavor of these non-acolic beverages so that they feel more compelling. You know, they're not just technically scratching the you know, the box of non-acolic beer, but they're actually nice to drink non-acolic beverages. Yeah, I'll mention something that I have used to great effect with these products that brewers don't often think about and that is just plain old salt. It is surprising how much you can influence a beer with salt at what I would call imperceptible levels of saltiness, but that changed the both both mouthfeel and sweetness. So that's that's something that I encourage people to play with. It doesn't doesn't take much to nudge it in in a favorable area. There are also, you know, I kind of mentioned, I mentioned that there's a lot of bench topping that happens and you know, my journey with NABIR started being quite skeptical, right? Like 2018-ish. I had been encouraged to look into this space and I kind of wrote it off initially because I didn't understand the consumers, I didn't understand the beverage, I didn't understand a lot about it, and it took joining a Facebook group about non-alcohol beer to really understand how people who are enthusiastic about the space talk about it and think about it and share and ship beer across the country. Like, it really reminded me of early craft beer days where everyone is super excited about their regional product and they're sending it around the country. And it helped me develop a little bit of a mind shift myself on how to approach making these products better and fitting the need state of the people who are already interested in the space, which really what I'm driving at is a lot of the work happens downstream because it's not you've done this simple, clean thing up front. You're leaving yourself opportunity to lean into, you know, we mentioned acids, lactic acid, malic acid, citric acid, in various amounts can influence again the perception of fermentation. I think that's super, super useful. Other sweeteners, there's so many sweeteners available. You can lean into things like if you're looking for low calorie type products, there's the monk fruits and the steveas out there, but you can use things like brewer's crystals or just straight up dextrose, which I know we said glucose is something that the yeast will ferment, but if you're going to pasteurize it immediately, it is now available to you as a potential sweetener. All these things, multi dextrin, there are so many different ways to add body to your product. There are even some fiber products. There's something out there called Fibersol that I have used again to add body. There's so many ways for you to nudge this in the more beery direction, like you said, but it takes a ton of experimentation at the bench top. I think about these things maybe more closely to say soda production or even energy drinks, like you can do so much and so many interesting things if you approach it with a bit more curiosity on the downstream portion. Yeah, I don't know what you've seen, Jamie, but there's a lot of examples that I've tried that just the bitterness is a little too high, and the sweetness and body is too low. If those levels came a little bit closer, I'd be like, this would be a perfect beer. Yeah, I think if I think about it, because we've done some reviewing of non-alcoholic beers over the years, so there's a couple of years ago with our blind panel. The worst examples tasted basically like, like, seltzer with extract beer flavor added to them. I think at that point, the broodog beers were a pretty bad horrible example. They needed to be negative. They were some pretty unfortunate beers that scored for us at the lowest that we'd seen. I think a lot of these things in the years since then, they could very well have improved. Not standpoint, same kind of thing with gluten-free beers, early days of sorghum beers were not necessarily the most compelling things, but today, gluten-free beers are absolutely fantastic. The technology moves really quickly, and where we are now is not where we were two years ago. But on that spectrum, now, I also judged in Poland the non-alcoholic beer category, and seeing the range of beer flavors within this 25, 30 beers in a non-alcoholic category ranging from sour-fruited beer to blogger and IPA or Lagerish and IPA. It's interesting to see just how broad some of this flavor in the NA space can get, and just what is possible using these kinds of process. I can go on with that forever. We've got some other questions out here. We have a question about foam and head retention. You may have missed that one, Sean Knight asked this one about, and you guys mentioned using wheat in your grist early on, are there any other way that you capture that kind of foam and head character in non-alcoholic beers? The biggest cheat is tetrahexa hot products. It doesn't take much, really, increases the foam stability. So, leaning into as much of the traditional routes as possible, but I think Tim mentioned it, like leaving a little bit of room in your beers to have a small addition of tetrahexa. Let's see. We had any other body builders. Someone in the comments is mentioning propylene glycol. There's other mentions of things like vanilla here in the comments of ways to build some perception of body and sweetness, even without necessarily adding sweetness itself. Yeah, I think some of the products that I mentioned, however, that like fibrousol, particularly multi-dextrin and brus crystals again, can work. Flaver houses also have products that they use to help influence mouthfeel. They're generally pretty guarded about what's in there. They have their own proprietary blends of things, but there are products out there that you can, from flavor houses, that you can use to help build some component of mouthfeel. Anything else on the stabilization piece, in terms of chemical process stabilization, obviously, with the wine world has its own stabilization methods. You are all mentioning pH, but you're not talking about some of those other stabilization processes that other beverage categories may use. Is there reason why or why not? There isn't much research about preservatives in non-alcoholic beer. It's really hard for us as a company to recommend anything as, again, silver bullet. We do work with companies that use preservatives like potassium sorbate or whatnot, along with other factors like flash pasteurization or whatnot to help lead towards a safe end product. But, you know, there's Anthony, what's the name of the stabilizer, the killing organismers that use in Germany. That's not legal in the states yet. Nagardo. There are definitely products out there that I think can assist in stabilizing products. And full transparency when I was making NA products, I was evaluating all of these things as alternatives to pasteurization. And I think the conclusion is ultimately where your level of risk tolerance is and what your product and support. So some of these have cases where they are best used and some of them are maybe not good for all use cases. And I think it's kind of, I don't mean to give an answer that says it depends, but it very much depends on what your product is. And if you're curious about your specific product, I would definitely encourage you to talk to more people so that you are, you're no longer unsure. There are plenty of people you can call us. We can put you in touch with people, but we shouldn't be afraid to ask people whether or not we're doing the right thing because it's one of those situations where all it takes is for one news story to occur. It doesn't matter who's NA they purchased, but it could be impactful to the industry as a whole. And I think that's not something like we're all interested in growing this space, not interested in shrinking it. So reach out. You know, brewers are amazing at sharing their knowledge and information with people. So whether that be people in your brewery network or like I said, reach out to any of the four faces on your screen. And we can, we can make sure to get you in touch with someone to help answer your specific question on something like safety. And I understand especially in this kind of category, it's hard to answer anything with a very broad widely applicable answer, but in more direct answers around specific, you know, recipes, you know, products, processes, you can give more focused answers that can help guide people in those specific directions. Emails again, Hayden is just posted them back in the chat for folks that need them. I want to again talk maybe talk about since Tim, you're such a magician when it comes to using hops or their specific hops within the scope of these very, you know, very light, you know, no ABB or sub point five ABB beers that you find add texture, add, you know, quality or is there something beyond just, you know, HSI and BU that you look for and something that's going to help build a round, beery flavor in some of these beers. Yeah, I mean, I would try to find that balance between say on a hot side hop having a kind of lower alpha acid, so you could use a little bit more of it. But again, you're still going to as you build that structure you're talking about Jamie, you can overwhelm it very quickly. So approach each hop as its own little key, you know, low co-humulone, you know, SIMCO might work great in a West Coast IPA for bittering or 30 minutes, but it might just kind of blast through in the wrong way right away. That's something I hope to do experiment more with in our pilot brewery soon is that exact question. Sure, do you have any more questions out there in the chat, throw them up there and I'll try to get them in here for it. We had a question about a redux on the mash, how hot and how fast, I know we did cover it, but we'll do a quick redux on that one. Sure, good starting point is 160F for your machine temperature. Start with like a 10 minute rest before mashing off the range of things that can be successful. I've seen people as low as like 155, people as high as like 165, and spending any number of minutes in rest from zero minutes in rest to some people as much as like 30 minutes of rest. So start at 160, 10 minutes and go from there. You just had a question about hop creep. I assume in this one since we're not fermenting lots of trios and the insinantica impact, it is not going to help affect these yeasts and fermenting more of the small amount of glucose you put into this. That's actually a really good point. I'm glad it came up. One thing you wouldn't want to do is add your hops into your fermenter at knockout of your work because the hops do contain amino acids and amino acids. That's a really good point. I mean, amylase enzymes that are going to break down the starch into more glucose. So you're actually going to be coming out of spec during that fermentation period. We've seen this happen before. You're also adding hops which we know have, they're an agricultural product, that's that have bacteria all over them. You're adding them at the most sugary point where there is no fermentation every 20 minutes I think. I can. So don't add hops at the beginning of fermentation. Adam, when you're crashing your tank. And I think we kind of glossed over this a little bit. In general, you guys actually kind of, for flavor reasons, not just food safety reasons, kind of don't love dry hopping these beers. We did a pilot batch regionally and I think we dry hopped at 0.7 pounds per barrel and that actually seemed pretty nice. Yeah, we're not going to need for those kind of wordier flavors then or the tea like extracted flavors. Correct. I think what it allows the hops to really sort of punch above their weight in such a, it's a very, it's a lighter matrix to begin with and you're not getting more of the vegetable component, the agricultural component from hops. So it's, yeah, I would say, again, start low. You can always add products downstream to bump it up to help give you a sense of like, how much more might I need to add to get the intended effect that I actually want here? I could even pasteurize those hops. That's a small enough amount. Put that in the microwave. That's actually something that we haven't talked about. I'm actually glad you brought that up. These products as a whole are the cogs can be pretty favorable because you're using less of almost everything. And they show up on the shelf often pretty close to the same price point as standard beer. So there's quite a bit of space there for you to play which might make it, might make it something worth exploring. Yeah, the presentation is not a thing with these use. In our own special way there. But I was going to say if this is a space that you want to play in, but you're like, tunnel pasteurization is the way I want to do it, but I'm not going to get involved. I don't have the money. I don't have the budget to do that. There are co-packers out there who we work with that have tunnel pasteurizers and it might be worth just having a conversation with them. And we can connect you with them. Anthony, what's the smallest package size that you sell these MA yeasts in? Yeah, so right now these are kind of a made to order product for us. Of course, for trialing purposes, we can get you small amounts to pitch and trial. We would be looking to do that, of course, for someone who's looking to grow a brand. So if you wanted to get a one barrel pitch one time, maybe we could help you out with that, but we're looking to have larger orders, I guess. So again, for starting out purposes, we can accommodate small pitches. You might have to be flexible at this time in terms of when those products are available. And then after that, if you're looking for like 30 barrels or more, we can make sure that we have yeast available for you, you know, made to order. We have a question there about, you know, asking pretty transparency about process. I don't think that's something that this group can speak to necessarily, but I do think that it's a broader issue that the entire craft beer world will have to answer. And that certainly a question I have when I walk in and see a brewery offering a non-alcoholic beer, particularly if it's on draft, I would love to see where they checked off the last, you know, time that that draft line was cleaned and want to, you know, there's an immense amount of trust that has to take, again, you know, this is from the producing the product standpoint. Albury's then communicate that to consumers is going to be another big question down the road if this product category is going to continue to grow the way that it is. We've got a couple more minutes here, Ben, as someone who doesn't make non-alcoholic beer, but is interested in this category, but also understands that it has to get a whole bunch of bottom lines. It has to work with in a production process that you all can be comfortable with, and you have to be able to safely produce this, safely package it, and communicate this entire thing out to your consumer. What are you looking at for next steps within your own brewery, and how you take steps forward in an on-alcoholic space? Yeah, I think for us, I'm pretty committed that if we're going to do this as anything other than a small batch kind of, you know, a tabletop situation that we're going to be committed to batch tonne pasteurization of finished beer. I think that's just for me the gold standard on this, and so that means for us either investing in that equipment or finding a co-packer and getting into a contract situation, both which are possible, those then become business calculations, not so much about the art of brewing, but more like, do we think that this is something that we want to kind of put a million dollar investment in in equipment, or do we think this is something that we can grow to a moderate size within our kind of overall brand mix, and maybe we do this for a year or two. That's it. We're launched with other products categories that also could benefit from that, whether that's backswing cider or various fruit beverages, etc. That said, you know, at the small level and talking with Tim and Anthony about this, I think that I am encouraged by the idea of us kind of at least kind of doing some innovation brewing around this. At the small batch level, we have the ability to make three barrel, one barrel, five barrel batches. Whether those are something that we're going to give, you know, served the public, I think, is a TBD question. But certainly from just the, you know, I do think that a worldly brewer should be engaged in this space in one way or another, and that it behooves all of us to understand the production and the safety concerns, the composition on these. So that's something we'll pursue, even if it doesn't commercialize. Sure. Anthony and Tim, we had some questions about geographical legality and ability. Talk about that. There are folks who've tuned in from the South Pacific, from Europe and other places. Are there some, you know, there's a whole patch work of different laws and, you know, how does that impact brewers that want to potentially brew with these yeast that you all are making? Currently, we are only available in the US. That is, you know, largely due to, like you said, the laws and regulations that other countries have around GMO products. It is, however, something that we are looking into, pursuing with places that are, would be favorable for us. So places that allow it are definitely up for consideration. If you have a specific question about a specific area, again, feel free to get our emails, and we can, we can talk at length about whether it is allowed in your country and whether it's on our roadmap to get used to you. Sure. And I can tell you from, having just talked last month with some German brewers. I mean, there is actually quite a bit of interest amongst European brewers in these products and some frustration that there are broad-based and restrictions against them and a big fear that they are going to lose in the innovation game in brewing in general. And so, you will see what that means for the Galilee worldwide after that. And then we've got one last question out there in the chat. What have you been drinking, Ben? Only, you know, that's between me and the bartender here, whether it's an A-beer or a regular beer, who knows? Well, that takes us past 90 minutes. Ben, thank you for leading this conversation. Tim and Anthony, thanks for sharing your expertise in this rapidly evolving, interesting segment of the beer world. It's amazing to watch just how fast an A-beer has been growing to see how it's gaining a photo. Obviously, still much larger in Europe, potentially than it is here. But with today's focus on healthy lifestyles and wanting to be social drink beer in these kinds of places, but maybe potentially drink less alcohol without drinking less beer, I think it's a huge growth potential for this. I've worked it into my own personal consumption, even mixing alcoholic beer and non-alcoholic beer through the course of drinking, just to again, enjoy the process, enjoy the people, enjoy the places and spaces, but not get drunk in the process. And so I am absolutely thrilled and excited to see more tools and see Berkeley and others bringing more tools to this entire category to ultimately make better and better and better non-alcoholic beer. We will take this recording, post it out there. And so if anyone who's in here missed anything along the way, you can go back and reference various points of the conversation. Tim and Anthony's emails are out there in the chat, so feel free to drop them. Is there anything else that you guys want to know before we wrap up here? I just want to say there's already a lot of materials on the craft beer and brewing website. There's a best practices document that Anthony and I have worked on. There's two recipes. There's some videos about safety. We're doing another video about recipe design soonish. And so yeah, there's a lot more than ever out there for anyone who wants to get started in the NA space. Great. Well, thank you all. Cheers. Thank you.


Hey everyone, Tim Shoshy from Berkeley East here again with my final video in a series exploring aspects of non-alcoholic beer production. Non-alcoholic beer sales have been reported to have grown almost 30% in 2024. That's a figure that breweries can't ignore, even if the segment is a small portion of overall beer sales. In one study, where consumers of non-alcoholic beer were surveyed, flavor in a variety of choice made up for 69% of what the subjects missed about consuming normal strength alcoholic beverages. That study was based on 418 subjects. Coincidentally, 418 is also the number of non-alcoholic beers that Hall of Fame baseball player waybogs once drank on a cross-country flight. What does this all mean to you? Well, it's obviously time for you to brew a great tasting non-alcoholic beer. This is such a fun space to experiment in. It's different from making normal strength beers, so I don't know about you. I'm really excited to be playing around with new ingredients and techniques and just thinking about beer in a very different way. Not to mention, all the other things you find amazing about brewing potentially have a home here as well, like milkshake IPAs. I can't wait to make an NA milkshake IPA. Truly, if you'd have the ability to pass draws in Wanda Brew and non-alcoholic milkshake IPA with me, hit me up. I'm so serious right now. A key part of this entire video and the recipe design process I'm going to walk you through is the strict use of maltose and maltotryose negative yeast for fermentation. This process can produce great tasting beer without the need of expensive alcohol removal equipment. Because these beers go through the tiniest fermentation, they tend to smell more like worth than beer. And that's why the most influential ingredient in brewing a high quality non-alcoholic beer is the yeast. I am going to put on my sales hat here because I honestly believe the following. Berkeley yeast, two NA strains, Kavanaugh and Classic are the best on the market. These two versions have been engineered to further capabilities to remove word aroma than our competitors products. Like I mentioned before, because you have so little fermentation happening in a beer that will be no higher than 0.5% ABV, then you have a lot of untransformed molecules. And thus you have that wordy aroma. That's not the case for our strains. We have bioengineered NA Classic and NA Kavanaugh to offer produced beer metabolites like esters so that your NA beer smells and tastes like normal strength beer. NA Classic, it also produces a small amount of hop adjacent compounds during fermentation. In NA Kavanaugh produces tropical fruit and New Zealand sovignon blanc like aromas. These added features further eliminate word aroma. And added benefit that I think is an important fact about our NA yeast is that they are 100% saccharomyces. They're not hybrids, they're not picky, they are brewers yeast from top to bottom. So the learning curve of their fermentation is minimal. There are no odd procedural requirements when it comes to fermentation. You oxygenate as normal and knock out for men at 68, just like most ALEC views. But before we talk about the brewery process, let's point out the four main differences between NA beer versus normal strength beer. The main differences are lack of ethanol as a sensory component, lack of ethanol as a solvent, lack of the other fermentation characteristics that accompany alcohol production, and lack of ethanol as a stabilizer against pathogenic bacteria. If you want to learn more about the food safety concerns of brewing NA beer due to the lack of ethanol, which you definitely should, check out my videos on YouTube or read Berkeley yeast best practices document on our website. All of these can also be found on craft beer and brewing website, both of which will be linked in the video just description below. Ethanol provides so many features for beer that we as brewers have learned to work alongside of sweetness and body effects, it's aroma for better or for worse, and it's ability as a solvent for flavor extraction from hops and other ingredients. Please need to be considered and reevaluated through the lens of an ethanol less product due to the absence of ethanol, some ingredients and flavors that brewers commonly infused will be poorly extracted or the opposite overwhelmed the NA beer at the addition levels that we are used to. But we'll return to that last subject shortly. Building the framework for your non-alphorestubi should start with choosing a maltose and maltotriose negative yeast, and they creating the proper mesh conditions and parameters to ensure a 0.5% ABV or lower beer. It is very important to get as much fermentation as possible up to 0.5% ABV, so a word that has a small amount of glucose, but not too much is key. As a result, our main objective in the mesh is to limit glucose production. This is achieved through two methods. First, your mesh will be much smaller than your used to. Typically your starting gravity will be in the 5-6 Plano range, give or take. Secondly, I would suggest a very short mesh rest at 160 degrees Fahrenheit for only several minutes. We aren't really worried about efficient enzymatic action here because our yeast can't ferment the maltose released by this high-timp alpha-MLA's rest, but that doesn't mean off-target organisms will not ferment maltose, so keeping sugar production low in general could be beneficial to stability. Which malt's would I recommend? Honestly, as you and your brewery begin to explore the NA space, I think it is important to keep things simple. For this reason, a base recipe for any lighter style, like a pilser, up to an IPA, should have a crisp of mostly North American T-Rail. This is a consistently multi-grain that will give us reproducible results, adding in some foam positive grains like multi-weed or some characterful grains like Vienna or North Munich is completely acceptable. But, keep specially malt to a minimum at first. I do think getting some dexterner chipmulten there helps with body and texture so I recommend some Porsche over either of those. As you mash in, target a much higher liquid agrist ratio than usual, somewhere in the 4-1 range, an adequate amount of acid to buffer the rise of pH we're going to see once the sparse begins. I've always used phosphoric but lactic works here as well. A mashed pH of 4.8 with the high liquid agrist is a good starting point. Once your mash is steeped for just five minutes, it's time to begin to boil off and then louder. Sorry, you're going to have to wait a little longer to take your bathroom break. One thing I'll mention now is do not get too far ahead of yourself. We are all familiar with the concept of being able to add but not take away. This greatly applies here. We can always add more bitterness, add more hot flavor, color, haze, so start with a simple recipe and build from there. And, don't forget, if you're going to pasteurize beer, great. That means that once the beer is cold and further fermentation is inhibited and you can add sweeteners and body enhancers without fear of further feeding any bacteria or yeast present. Now that loudering is complete, your kettle is full and your word is about to boil. Let's take a moment to talk about hot side hopping. Depending on the style of beer you're trying to emulate, hot side hops are going to help develop authentic beer flavors. But with the lack of ethanol, bitterness and a stringency can overpower your beer very quickly. I would use caution and be judicious when bittering all sub-stiles of NABIR. Keep IBUs on the lower side of the start. Remember, you can always add more bitterness via tetra later on. Whirlpool hops can definitely give your beer a layered hoppiness, but too many could lead to cooked vegetative quality, kind of like that black tea flavor that one might find in hot waters. I would consider using cryo to limit vegetative stringency and don't forget, if you're fermenting with either a Berkeley yeast and a strains, you'll also get some hop-like aromatics just by using those. Pretty cool. Okay, our Whirlpool hops are added. Now's the time to further adjust your pH and your kettle. Bring it down so that your final word pH will be 4.8 if it isn't there already. If it's lower than 4.8, don't worry. Low pH helps slow the growth of many microbes, which is 100% a good thing in non-off brewing. Okay, it's time to chill your work for fermentation. If you've been unimpressed with non-auheas, then it's time to give our strains a try. Feel free to email me to talk about getting you a pitch or to talk about the many-world's theory. Either one, I'm very happy to discuss. Like I mentioned before, chill the work to 68 or so. Irrate is normal, about 10 parts per million, and then watch fermentation with our yeast rip away. Our pitch rate is 1.5 million cells per milliliter per degree play-doh. So we're going to be finished with fermentation sometimes in as little as 12 hours. The real degree of fermentation is going to only be about 10 to 20%. After fermentation is complete, you'll want to take measures to slow any growth of bacteria that may have snuck into the beer. Adjust your pH so that it is below 4.2 and get the beer cold immediately. While the beer is cold, we can execute bench top trials of all sorts of flavorings and additives to further framework our beer. Hold some beer from the tank, evenly split it up into containers or flasks and iterate numerous blends tweaking any number of variables. Let's take one small step back. Now, if you're making an IPA, I don't know about you, but I dislike the grassy flavors from a cold dry hub. So let's make an exception for hops as the only non-sanitary ingredient we will add before crashing. Add them at the end of fermentation at the same time as or soon after you crash the tank. This way you'll extract some aroma and flavor, but inhibit bacterial growth. By the way, don't crash the tank lower than 36 degrees Fahrenheit or you might freeze the beer. Once your beer is cold and you've worked through your bench top trials, bring in your additives to your full batch. You can add preservatives like potassium sorbet or a kyber and microclear combo. Start to adjust all the other metrics of the recipe like sweetness via a company like pure malt. But one thing you won't want to manipulate at this time is haze because once your beer is tasting right with all of these additives added, then now it's time to find filter and or centerfuge your beer. I highly suggest using some forward mechanical clarification. You'll want to get as much protein, hops and yeast out of there as you can. The more of those remaining in your beer during pasteurization, the more idolized and stale flavors will arise. But Tim, my customers, they like the hazees. I can't filter my beer. Ah, don't worry cousin Sal. There are products in the market and you can do some after filtration that will add haze back into your beer like hot hot bait or carry biohazes. So make a clear beer hazee again. After that carbonate your beer as high as you possibly can, package it and then send it to the pasteurizer. Not pasteurizing your beer, then keep it cold at all times until consumed. If you want to see some specific numbers for aggrists, hops or natural flavorings and extract usage, click the link in the video description that will bring you to two non-alcohol recipes on our website that are originally wrote for craft beer and brewing. I have a pilsner and a west coast IPA recipe that can help you get started. And keep checking back as I will be adding more and more recipes and content, not just about non-alcohol, but all of our yeast and the styles you can brew with them. And of course, reach out to us at Berkeley East. We are more than happy to help guide you through the start of your non-alcohol journey. People are drinking less alcohol, but the quality of craft non-alcohol beer is getting better. Don't lose customers to other non-alcohol categories. I've tasted some really good craft non-alcohol beers lately and I know for a fact that anyone can brew something special. You just need the right ingredients, the right yeast, and of course you need to have safe practices. Speaking of creating something special, if you've liked my video, maybe press the like button and consider subscribing so you can catch all my content. All right, y'all. Thanks for watching along. For Berkeley East, I'm Tim Shasha, Best of luck with your non-alcohol brewing.