This newsletter entry features a product recommendation by me, Julia. It is not sponsored content.
Just because I write about something doesn't necessarily mean I like it. Some ideas or trends are relevant to a reader no matter what the journalist's taste may be. This story, for example, was about a new crop of bitter nonalcoholic beverages, and while I tasted all of them during my reporting, I do not consume all of them regularly. So, unless you see “my picks,” “my favorite,” “try these,” or “the best” somewhere in the headline or body copy, please don’t assume I’m recommending the products mentioned in an article.
This is not the case with Al's, which I wrote about in The Washington Post in April. It's my favorite pilsner-style nonalcoholic beer and founder Alban dePury is a truly lovely man, to boot. He makes Al’s with the help of Barrel Brothers Brewing Co. founder and brewmaster Wesley Deal and Chris Anderson, lead brewing expert for BevZero, a consulting firm that helps brands make nonalcoholic wine, beer, and cider.
Anderson studied food science at the University of Alaska and has been in the craft beer industry for 25 years, earning over 400 medals and ribbons. (That is not a typo!) He’s a wealth of knowledge and has become a go-to source for me, so I decided to share some bonus material from my first interview with him, which was for that Washington Post piece. And if you don’t care to read anything else on this topic, just go buy some Al’s.
Had you made nonalcoholic beer before working with Al's?
Oh, yeah. I had worked with dialysis membrane technology, which pushes the product through a tight sequence of filtrations at really high pressures. The alcohol gets concentrated and you're able to separate it from the other stream at cold temperatures.
I thought that was the best beer on the planet prior to playing with GoLo technology. (Here's a video that explains GoLo.) The difference between two is the ability to separate and segregate what we call the essence stream. We distill off all the volatile aromas and complex flavor constituents first before they get separated in another column that would fractionalize out all the alcohol. So, we pull that essence stream first at lower temperature than alcohol, retain it, and when everything is done, we build that back in. We're talking about things like hop aroma, malt complexity, some of your mouthfeel—all the things that are integral to keeping the integrity of whatever beer you're trying to make.
What were the particular challenges with making Al's?
Alban knew what he wanted: a European-style lager. That immediately took my mind for a spin. I thought, "Man, there's no smoke and mirrors with a lager." With ales, you have esters and fruity flavors that allow you to hide or mask off flavors. A lager is a crisper, cleaner profile. There's not a lot of room for goof-ups.
So, we kind of reverse-engineered things. We built our formula around what we know happens inside of the machine: It's going to concentrate flavors by 30%, so we reduced the hops by about that amount. Historically we've had some issues with foam stability, so we focused on building a grain bill—the list of all the grain malts and adjuncts used in a specific beer recipe—that would add body.
Otherwise, it's pretty much a traditional European lager from start to finish. We didn't try to get cute with it; we focused on German noble hops, all German malts, and making sure our water profile was dialed in and hit proper PH levels. All of those points are critical controls for us.
Legally, by the way, you can't say that this is based on a traditional Northern-style German pilsner beer. [Pilsner is a lager.] It's a TTB thing. You can say IPA [in the nonalcoholic context] and I think maybe even amber, which technically isn't even a style. Stout, I think you can say. It's goofy; I don't know what the reasoning is behind it.
How do you keep Al's shelf-stable?
A lot of people are pasteurizing, but that's not the best for beer. It tends to create cooked flavors. We use an oak liquefaction called Brewshield to ward off oxidation, which is a huge problem with nonalcoholic beer. The Brewshield is a powerful antioxidant that goes into the finished wort and acts as a barrier to all the transition metal reactions that could happen downstream. Those are the precursors for oxidation.
Do you drink Al’s on a regular basis?
Yes! This is the first time in my life when I've focused on my own wellness. In October 2020 I started a weight loss journey and I've had maybe three or four alcoholic beverages since January. I feel great.
While there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to nonalcoholic beer—take a peek at the last edition of this newsletter—it’s not exactly news that, thanks to technological improvements, there are a number of delicious options today. Can we stop with these kinds of headlines?
That said, I’m glad that Susan Orlean, who turned her wine consumption into quite the schtick last summer, has made this discovery: