IT IS GONE MIDNIGHT when I turn the key in the ignition and fire up the
engine. I’m looking forward to getting home—for the past four hours I’ve
been sitting at a bar pouring beer down my throat. I’m bloated and tired, and I
know that if the police stop me, they’ll breathalyse me. And I almost hope they
do. Not because I’m past caring, but because those seven bottles contained less
than a teaspoonful of alcohol between them.
On the face of it, alcohol-free beer sounds about as crazy as chocolate-free
chocolate bars. Yet when these brews and their low-alcohol cousins first arrived
on the market, they were seen as the driver’s saviour. It was the 1980s, after
all, not a time when many men wanted to be seen nursing a small glass of
lemonade. So what better than a drink that looks and tastes like normal beer,
yet doesn’t make you a law-breaker—or worse—if you drive after
downing a few?
Unfortunately, low-alcohol beers haven’t quite lived up to the promise of
their early days. “I hate to be so negative,” says Graham Stewart, director of
the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling at Heriot-Watt University
near Edinburgh in Scotland, “but to be honest, I think they’re all bloody awful.
They start off tasting bad and, because the flavour stability is poor, they get
even worse.”
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The taste problem hasn’t gone unnoticed by drinkers. In 1988, after four
years of growth, sales of low-alcohol beer in Britain peaked at just over 1 per
cent of the market—about one and a half pints per person per year. Since
then, sales have slumped to less than a fifth of that. The picture is pretty
much the same in the US, where sales of low-alcohol beers have been in decline
since their peak in 1992.
So why do these beers taste so bad? The problem seems to begin at the brewing
stage. Normal beers are made by mixing barley, hops and yeast in warm water to
make a fragrant soup called a wort. Keep it at around body temperature and over
the next few days or weeks the wort ferments, producing a beer containing
between 3 and 8 per cent alcohol.
One way to make a low-alcohol brew is simply to stunt this fermentation
stage—by running the process at a chilly 1 °C, for example. That way,
you can turn out a beverage with less than 0.05 per cent alcohol (which in
Britain and the US is classified as alcohol-free). The trouble is that you also
end up with less of the characteristic fruity and bitter flavours that make
beer, well, beer.
Alternatively, you can use a yeast that ferments only one or two of the three
main sugars—glucose, maltose and maltotriose—present in the wort.
Again, you end up with less alcohol, but these beers tend to be sweeter than
average because of the unfermented sugar. So most low-alcohol beers are
brewed like their normal cousins and only afterwards is the excess alcohol
removed, either by evaporation or with a filter designed to capture only ethanol
molecules. Sadly, neither technique is perfect—they strip out most of the
alcohol all right, but other vital flavours are also lost on the way.
Suppose chemists did invent a way of removing all of the alcohol that leaves
the beer’s flavour untouched. Would we end up with something more palatable?
Probably not, say the experts.
“Even if you have a perfect filter system,” says Stewart, “because the
ethanol is gone, the beer will still taste blander than before.” Charlie
Bamforth, professor of brewing science at the University of California, Davis,
agrees: “Ethanol has a direct impact on flavour—it has a warming, vinous
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But it turns out that ethanol does more than just add a distinctive flavour
of its own. “I’m convinced there’s a synergistic effect between alcohol and the
other flavour compounds,” says Stewart. Quite why isn’t clear, but most
researchers in the field point out that many of the molecules that give beer its
flavour—things like esters and sugars, for instance—are far more
soluble in alcohol than water.
Alcohol is so good at concentrating these molecules that you’ll notice its
flavour-enhancing effect even if you can’t taste the alcohol itself. To
Stewart, this single component is indispensable. “The only way to make a
non-alcoholic beer taste any good,” he reasons, “is to add alcohol to it.”
The effect of alcohol on beer flavour has also been studied extensively by
Philippe Perpète of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He found
that while alcohol makes some flavours more prominent, it masks other, less
palatable tastes. One especially nasty chemical called methional becomes far
more distinctive in non-alcoholic beers. The reason, Perpète found, is
that the threshold at which drinkers can detect methional depends on the amount
of alcohol in the beer—the lower the alcohol content, the more obvious the
nasty methional flavour becomes.
Bad taste
So Perpète and his colleagues set out to find an alcohol substitute
that might help hide this unpleasant taste. One good candidate, on paper at
least, is glycerol—and sure enough when they added it to low-alcohol
beer, the taste of the methional disappeared. There was just one problem,
though. “The glycerol made it taste awful,” says Perpète, “and we never
tried it again.” He is now working with a genetically modified yeast that lacks
the enzyme needed to make both ethanol and methional but at the moment, the
European food industry isn’t keen to try it.
As if alcohol wasn’t already doing enough for your beer, researchers have
also discovered that it contributes to the way the brew looks. A little ethanol,
it seems, is what gives your beer that lovely, frothy head. One of the ways it
does this is by helping to crosslink proteins and compounds in the beer. “But we
found there’s more to it than that,” says Peter Wilde of the Institute of Food
Research in Norwich. “Alcohol [also] lowers the surface tension, so you can
create bubbles more easily.”
Alcohol seems to be so vital that you might imagine today’s low-alcohol beers
are a pretty dreary draught. That’s not entirely true, however. Many of the
low-alcohol beers available today are a great improvement on their 1980s
ancestors. The brewers have been hard at work, learning how to put flavours back
into the beer, and how to control the foamy head with additives. Indeed, when it
comes to selling the stuff, perhaps the biggest challenge facing brewers today
is not the taste of low-alcohol beers but their image.
Few who tried a low-alcohol beer in the early days have forgotten the
experience. In tests carried out about nine years ago by Britain’s Bass brewing
company, people were asked to rate a range of non-alcoholic beers. None of them
scored as highly as regular beers—even though that’s exactly what they
were. The tasters scored them down, Bass believes, simply because they expected
them to be bad.
Another problem facing the brewers is that attitudes to drinking aren’t quite
as macho as they were in the 1980s. “They were pitched at people who wanted to
be seen drinking a beer,” says Bamforth. “Probably people are more sophisticated
than that now.”
In fact, the idea that anyone would order a low-alcohol beer simply to look
as though they’re drinking the real stuff is rather sad. OK, so that’s exactly
what I’ve been doing all evening—and you should have seen the black looks
I got when I downed my final beer and reached for the car keys. So is it really
worth it? Next time I’ll be sticking to the real stuff, and getting the bus
home.