Brewing alcohol free

Share your experiences of using brewing yeast.
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ingo
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by ingo » Mon Sep 09, 2019 1:37 pm


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PeeBee
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by PeeBee » Mon Sep 09, 2019 2:45 pm

That doesn't tell me anything that I didn't know already. The article does surprise me … but only in that the author expresses surprise with the results! But the article is dated 2011 and the author might know better now?

Crystal malt has very little "fermentable" sugar, because the conditions it is created under favours alpha-amylase, not beta, so nearly all the converted starch is converted to dextrin. One of the lightest crystal malts ("Carapils") is also called "dextrin malt". But mash crystal malt and beta-amylase makes short work converting that dextrin to maltose. Which is why I never understand people adding Carapils to the mash "to increase body" :-? .

So I'm careful not to mash lower than 72C, and even that might be a bit cool so I'll go back to 74-75C* next time. And some dextrin is fermentable by some yeasts (maltotriose is a dextrin) so I ferment with "S-33" yeast which is well known to have no stomach for maltotriose (S-04 ferments maltotriose a bit, so I'm surprised the author of that article used it).

So the article has been posted to help me prove I'm right? Thank you.

* Some maltose is created at these temperatures, but the amount created is severely limited. I've been getting less than 30% attenuation for some of my "hot mash" low-alcohol beers.
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

ingo
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by ingo » Mon Sep 09, 2019 3:18 pm

PeeBee wrote:
Mon Sep 09, 2019 2:45 pm
So the article has been posted to help me prove I'm right? Thank you.

You're welcome. :)

Though I'm not really into right and wrong but prefer to collect a "critical mass" of information and this is one dot. There's thousands of (scientific) articles in my Zotero database on brewing and amazingly little on this way of brewing with a cold mash or only extracting from cara/crystal malts. Even though cold mashing wasn't new when Briess published their findings.

Guess I'll have to get my smallest brew kit out (a 1l coffee press) and start a range of tests,

Ingo

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john luc
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by john luc » Wed Oct 09, 2019 2:18 am

Being thinking about the issue of encouraging alpha amylase instead of beta. Under normal mashing at 64c/68c range we tend to opt for the low 5 PH range but in the cold mash scenario to produce low fermentables with some dextrins I'm thinking about flaring PH.
Beta likes it best between 4.0 to 5.5 PH and Alpha likes it at 6.7 to 7.0 PH. Alpha also has a fondness for calcium so maybe calcium carbonate might be an addition.
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by PeeBee » Wed Oct 09, 2019 10:04 am

john luc wrote:
Wed Oct 09, 2019 2:18 am
Being thinking about the issue of encouraging alpha amylase instead of beta. Under normal mashing at 64c/68c range we tend to opt for the low 5 PH range but in the cold mash scenario to produce low fermentables with some dextrins I'm thinking about flaring PH.
Beta likes it best between 4.0 to 5.5 PH and Alpha likes it at 6.7 to 7.0 PH. Alpha also has a fondness for calcium so maybe calcium carbonate might be an addition.
Higher pH? Not sure about that, I think a pH of 6 or higher brings with it other "issues"?

As for using calcium carbonate: My views of that stuff (chalk) are pretty dismissive! It cannot be made to dissolve in any significant (measurable even) quantity (I believe you can encourage it to dissolve by bubbling CO2 through it under pressure). I was advising someone recently of the damage done by accidentally dropping an entire 50g pot of chalk into his mash - the damage done will be zilch.

I'm beginning to go off "cold mashing" a bit. Having performed a side-by-side comparison (with "hot mashing") I reckon the flavours could be skewing a bit too much, although it might go better with a contemporary style? Certainly my "cold mash" experiment was drifting much further away from my original intention of coming up with a "Big Drop Pale Ale" clone. "Cold mashing" seems to exaggerate (greatly) the "sweetie" flavours, like I was getting "wine gums" flavours, but without actually being sweet of course. Interesting process and results, but probably not worth risking the reported "burnt taste" issues and destroyed heating elements?
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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john luc
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by john luc » Wed Oct 09, 2019 11:08 am

To help with the burnt issue I presume pre filtering before boil might be best.
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by john luc » Wed Oct 09, 2019 11:16 am

We had our 5th Brecon last Saturday and a talk by WHC, a yeast provider who said he has a strain that only ferments a small range of the sugars available. He said they will not release it as brewerys who may us it would need very clean packaging as any bacteria would attack the remaining sugars.
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by john luc » Wed Oct 09, 2019 12:45 pm

By raising the PH of the liquid mash you don't have the grain husks only the wort so extracting tannins should not be an issue. :?:
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by PeeBee » Wed Oct 09, 2019 5:15 pm

john luc wrote:
Wed Oct 09, 2019 11:08 am
To help with the burnt issue I presume pre filtering before boil might be best.
Nope!

That's what I thought, and with continuous recirculation I have very debris-free wort. But the culprit is in solution, until heat denatures it and brings it out of solution. It's "hot break" but not like we are used to.

Haven't I posted a piccie? Hang on, I'll go take a look …

… Thought so, this earlier post:
PeeBee wrote:
Wed Jul 24, 2019 5:39 pm
… I was so sure I'd be safe from "element burn" because of the constant recirculation and filtering through grain bed. But look at this! …
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by PeeBee » Wed Oct 09, 2019 6:29 pm

john luc wrote:
Wed Oct 09, 2019 11:16 am
We had our 5th Brecon last Saturday and a talk by WHC, a yeast provider who said he has a strain that only ferments a small range of the sugars available. He said they will not release it as brewerys who may us it would need very clean packaging as any bacteria would attack the remaining sugars.
Interesting. A bit more refined than my use of S-33 because it is so bad at fermenting dextrin (like the trisaccharide maltotriose), so I go out of my way to generate a high proportion of dextrin rather than maltose. A quest I've been quite successful at (74C mashes). But a wider choice of yeast wouldn't go amiss, and I'm beginning to suspect a high proportion of dextrin is responsible for some of the more unusual flavours I'm getting (like "wine/fruit gums", although the high protein content might be doing this too?).

Brewing low-alcohol beers already demands high levels of cleanliness because tiny hints of "off" flavours have much more impact in these beers.

I'd worry about this yeast strain with a very small band of sugars available to it for fermenting - would it not result in undesirably sweet beer?
john luc wrote:
Wed Oct 09, 2019 12:45 pm
By raising the pH of the liquid mash you don't have the grain husks only the wort so extracting tannins should not be an issue. :?:
Ah. That's what it's about is it.

But I'm using the "conversion" mash step to steep crystal malts. Because I perform this step at 74C I preserve the aforementioned dextrin in these malts. If the crystal malt is "cold mashed" the dextrin (which will be cold extracted) will be subject to an unquantifiable amount of conversion to maltose as temperature increases to "conversion mash step". So I'll stick to pH <6.
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by PeeBee » Thu Oct 10, 2019 12:30 pm

… As a continuation of the crystal malt discussion: I "convert" at a high temperature to preserve the dextrin in the crystal malt and not get it converted to "maltose" by beta-amylase. But I don't know if, and could not find any suggestion whether, dextrin in crystal malt is unconvertable by beta-amylase? Some folk believe adding Dextrin Malt (Carapils, an exceptionally lightly roasted crystal malt) to a mash increases the "body" of the final beer by adding dextrin? Plainly daft to me, the dextrin will be quickly reduced to maltose by beta-amylase in the mash. But maybe I'm wrong? Unlikely in this case, but … "citation needed"!

While looking in to this stuff I did come across: Lengths of sugars are described by "degree of polymerization", or "DP", such that:
Maltose (simple sugar with DP<3): DP=2 (i.e. a disaccharide).
Dextrin ("oligosaccharides" with DP 3 to 9: DP3-9 (e.g. maltotriose, a trisaccharide with DP=3).
Starches ("polysaccharides" with DP>9).
Helps picture what is being referred to as "dextrin". Dextrin means complex sugars with a carbon chain shorter than 10, which is a lot less than I'd previously thought.
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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john luc
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by john luc » Thu Oct 10, 2019 8:40 pm

This wine gum taste you mentioned would it be from the crystal additions I wonder.
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by PeeBee » Fri Oct 11, 2019 12:39 pm

john luc wrote:
Thu Oct 10, 2019 8:40 pm
This wine gum taste you mentioned would it be from the crystal additions I wonder.
My "theory" is (okay, it's a hypothesis):

The flavours do come from the crystal malt. There is a hint of the flavour in my "hot-mash" version (the "control"?). But …

I reckon it's the apparent high protein content in the beer that gives the flavour the "gelatine" quality of the "wine gum". Something about cold-mashing is also exaggerating the flavour too. Bear in mind the "cold-mash" version also has three times the quantity of base malts (wheat malt and "Munich malt" in this case), but the same quantity of crystal malts (150 crystal malt and "Caramalt" in this case). The crystal malts were hot steeped for the cold mash version, not included in the cold mash/extraction. Note: Because the base malt is cold mashed/extracted the OG (and FG) of this beer and the "control" is about the same. (About 53% attenuation for the hot mashed beer, 58% for the cold mash. Note this is a bit higher than my previous low-alcohol beers - which were closer to 30% attenuation - which I put down to doing the conversion for both the current beers at 72C instead of 74C).
Cask-conditioned style ale out of a keg/Cornie (the "treatise"): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzEv5 ... rDKRMjcO1g
Water report demystified (the "Defuddler"; removes the nonsense!): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

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john luc
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by john luc » Sun Oct 13, 2019 4:41 pm

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... 02/jib.465
Some bit of heavy reading here but still interesting approach.
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john luc
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Re: Brewing alcohol free

Post by john luc » Sun Oct 20, 2019 12:28 pm

The yeast mentioned in the above article is here. My thinking about adjusting PH is referred to in it. They recommend mash PH is adjusted. My thinking outside the box is working. Now if I can get back in the box that will be progress.
https://www.hefebank-weihenstephan.de/e ... en/wsl-17/
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