This evening, I’m reduced to re-alcoholising my alcohol-free beer. Unfortunately the cleanest-tasting vodka I have is “only” 40% ABV, so by adding enough of it to bring the beer back to its correct ABV… I’m technically watering-down the beer.
This might be the strangest cocktail I’ve ever made.
wow! How was it?
Okay. Not quite right; a definite “vodka”-ish taste to it!
interesting.
I always wondered how much of the quality difference in alcohol-free beer was due to the extraction process and how much due directly to the lack of ethanol. Adding everclear to beer is the obvious test.
That said, there are some quite good nonalcoholic beers on the market now. I wonder if there have been technological improvements in the alcohol removal process in the last decade.
Possibly the improvements in non-alcoholic beer have come specifically from the increased demand for it as a product, which increased the diversity of offerings, which in turn lead to competition between producers. Back when you’d get, probably, Becks Blue and that was about it, there was little need to try to differentiate your product from anybody else’s!
I had something like three different brands of non-alcoholic beer in my house to choose from at the time of my experiment! I selected the Guinness 0.0% specifically because it’s the one that tastes most-like the beer it’s trying to replicate. That’s not to say that the alcohol-free Corona or the Lucky Saint in my fridge weren’t as good: they’re both great (though of course Lucky Saint isn’t trying to replicate the flavour of an alcoholic variant of the same, it’s a born-to-be-alcohol-free beer). It’s just that I planned to judge my success (or not) based on how much like regular Guinness the result tasted.
And the result was… it tasted less like Guinness than when it was alcohol-free!
But yeah, I should definitely try with everclear or similar. Or perhaps I could do an experiment where I e.g. get regular and alcohol-free variants of a particular brew and mix them together in various ratios to make a spectrum of beers, from full-strength down to zero-alcohol, and see if I can taste the difference. Ideally it’d be double-blind, so I probably ought to have somebody re-arrange the vessels (recording what they moved where) then leave the room before my taste-test…