Booze for teetotalers! Biotech firm finds way to brew non-alcoholic beer that taste like regular beer

Booze-free beverage industry is booming and a wide variety of mock beers or non-alcoholic craft beers are popping up at super-markets. Potterheads will know the wizard king and his friends’ love for ‘Butterbeer’, a complete non-alcoholic drink. Now researchers have come up with a new sustainable way to brew non-alcoholic beer that tastes exactly like regular beer.

The study now published in Nature Biotechnology’ says people in Denmark and Europe who want to shift to a healthier non-alcoholic lifestyle with craft beers are failing to do so because they find the taste not as quiet as regular beer. Most of them find the taste flat and water-like, says Sotirios Kamprainis, Professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Moreover, it lacks the aroma from the hop due to the heating of the beverage to remove alcohol content. Hops are the dried, flowering parts of the hop plant (Humulus lupulus), used in brewing beer. Other alcohol-free beers made through limiting the fermentation process also lack the unique flavour of regular beer.

Biotech company EvodiaBio and its founders Kampranis and Simon Dusseaux have cracked the code to craft non-alcoholic beer with the taste and aroma of the regular beer with hop aroma.

The researchers found that by producing a group of small molecules called monoterpenoids that have the hoppy flavour and add it to beer at the end of the brewing process, one can give the beer its real flavour back. Kamprainis has called this procedure ‘game-changer’

Bakers’ yeast cells were turned into micro-factories that can be grown in fermenters and give an aroma of hops, the study says.

As soon as the hop aroma molecules are released, they are used into the beer. In this process the molecules just pass on the scent and flavor and not the actual hops that make it alcoholic.

Researchers find the brewing technique far more sustainable than the existing ones for mock beers. This process does not make the transportation of aroma hops from the west coast of the U.S absolutely necessary.

Moreover, hops require lots of water, 2-7 tons of water for a kg of hop cultivation making it not so-climate-friendly crop.

Kampranis hopes to change the brewing industry with this method and contribute to a much healthier lifestyle for many.