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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Making alcohol-free or low-alcohol beer that tastes good is actually really hard and is still actively being researched. Because of reasons, it’s even harder at homebrew scale.

    The main methods are:

    • biological method, aka arrested fermentation: low OG wort, ferment only briefly, then chill down hard to stop fermentation. Similar to what @plactagonic@sopuli.xyz described. You can further reduce the amount of alcohol produced by selecting a maltose-negative yeast, such as Saccharomycodes ludwigii or a maltose-negative Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain, such as Lallemand LalBrew LoNa, which has only been released recently.
    • physical method, aka dealcoholization: brew a normal strength wort, let it finish fermenting, then remove the alcohol through vacuum distillation or non-porous membrane distillation.

    Each of the methods have their drawbacks. If you use a maltose-negative strain, you need to be able to pasteurize your beer, otherwise infections are inevitable. This is the reason why LalBrew LoNa is currently not sold to home brewers, as Lallemand does not think that home brewers will be able to reliable pasteurize and use the yeast correctly. The beer will also taste worty and sweeter than regular beer. Dealcoholization on the other hand is basically impossible to do at home. It also leaves behind a thin-tasting beer with unsatisfactory mouthfeel. Recent research has shown that the best tasting non-alcohol/low-alcohol beer can be produced by blending two beers made with these two methods.







  • Celsius is also kinda arbitrary, but at least it sets its 0 and 100 to very fundamental, observable temperatures, namely the points where the state of matter of water changes. There are more constraints to it of course, in particular atmospheric pressure, and the modern definition of Celsius is actually purely based on Kelvin (which in turn uses the Boltzmann constant), but as long as you’re not high up in the Andes, everybody can observe a pretty good approximation of it.

    Its prevalence is also the outcome of a long process of many different scales. In 19th century Europe, before Celsius completely took over, Réaumur was also very popular. It set 0° at the freezing point of water and the boiling point at 80° under normal atmospheric conditions. Thinking about it, it’s quite wonky to do that, but at least it’s easy to convert to and from Celsius. On the other hand, the similarity in temperatures makes it slightly harder for plausibility checks.

    I ran into this when researching the history of some stuff and the specific scale was not always included, but the temperatures in the particular context both made sense as Celsius and Réaumur. That’s when you then have start digging through a whole early 19th century 500 page book printed in a German Gothic font just to see whether the specific temperature scale is mentioned anywhere.