‘Perfect booze for teetotalers’! Biotech firm brews non-alcoholic beer that tastes like ‘regular beer’!

Drinks without alcohol are booming in the market and supermarkets now sell a wide variety of mock beers and nonalcoholic craft beers. Potterheads would be familiar with the wizard king’s love for Butterbeer, a completely alcohol-free beverage. Researchers have developed a new sustainable method to make non-alcoholic beer that tastes like regular beer.

Researchers from Denmark and Europe have reported in Nature Biotechnology that people who want to switch to a non-alcoholic lifestyle with craft beer are unable to do so due to the taste of craft beer not being as pleasing as regular beer. Sotirios Kamprainis, Professor at the University of Copenhagen, says that most find the taste flat and water-like.

Moreover, the beverage loses the hop aroma due to the heating process required to remove alcohol. In brewing beer, hops are the dried flowering parts of the hop plant (Humulus lupulus). In addition, other alcohol-free beers lack the distinctive flavour of regular beer due to limiting the fermentation process.

Biotechnology company EvodiaBio and its founders Kampranis and Simon Dusseaux have cracked the code to create non-alcoholic beer with the taste and aroma of regular beer. The researchers found that by producing a small molecule that has the hoppy flavour and adding it to beer at the end of the brewing process, they can restore the taste of beer. This technique has been dubbed a ‘game-changer’ by Kamprainis.

Researchers turned bakers’ yeast cells into micro-factories that produce hops aromas in fermenters. The hop aroma molecules are added to the beer as soon as they are released. During this process, the molecules only carry scents and flavors, not the actual hops that make it alcoholic. Researchers have found the brewing technique to be far more sustainable than those used for mock beers. It is not necessary to ship aroma hops from the west coast of the United States because of this process.

Furthermore, hops require a lot of water, 2-7 tons of water per kilogram of hops, making it not climate-friendly. Kampanis hopes that this method will change the brewing industry and contribute to a healthier lifestyle for many.