How non-alcoholic beer is made
Most non-alcoholic beer starts as ordinary beer, and the alcohol is then pulled out of it.
- stations
- 6
- things upstream
- 58
- raw sources
- 21
- steps from the ground
- 9
The short version
Typical non-alcoholic beer is brewed as normal beer, then run through an alcohol-removing step just before finishing. Vacuum evaporation boils off the alcohol at low temperature. Reverse osmosis filters it out through a membrane. The cheapest method is simply diluting with water. The result must contain under 0.5 percent alcohol by volume in many places.
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Brew the wort
Malted grain is mashed in hot water, and the wort is boiled for roughly one to two hours with hops and other grains that add flavor, color and aroma.
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Ferment as usual
The cooled wort is saturated with air and yeast is added in the fermentation tank. This takes around ten days.
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Condition the beer
The fresh beer sits in a conditioning tank to age. Rushing this gives a green-apple off flavor called acetaldehyde.
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Remove the alcohol
Older plants heat the beer to boil alcohol off. Most modern breweries use vacuum evaporation to lower the boiling point, or push the beer through a membrane by reverse osmosis so no heating is needed.
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Filter and carbonate
The beer gets a last filtration, is carbonated and moves to a storage tank for bottling or kegging.
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Bottle or can
The finished beer is filled into bottles, cans or kegs.
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Worth repeating
- During Prohibition the Volstead Act limited drinks to 0.5 percent alcohol, and the weak brews were called near beer.
- Dealcoholized beer is over 0.05 but under 0.5 percent alcohol, while alcohol-free is lower than that.
- A newer process called dual-stage vacuum filtration captures flavor first, then removes the alcohol, then puts the flavor back.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and non-alcoholic beer starts as these 21 raw sources.
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Sources
Cite this page: "How non-alcoholic beer is made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/non-alcoholic-beer