With non-alcoholic beer, less is more. Less alcohol, but a lot more work. Getting a beer below 0.5% ABV is something several methods can do today. The hard part is keeping it a beer, with body, fullness and balanced bitterness.
Maltose-negative yeast: the simplest route below 0.5%
More and more breweries combine mashing at higher temperatures with fermentation on a maltose-negative strain. Such a strain does not ferment maltose, which makes up most of the fermentable sugars in the wort, so only a minimum of alcohol is produced.
Compared with the other routes, this approach has two practical advantages. There is no alcohol removal, and with it no investment in technology and no extra time. And fermentation can run to completion, unlike arrested fermentation, which depends on precisely timed cooling.
LalBrew LoNa is a hybrid bred from brewing strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, not a culture from other yeast genera. That is exactly why it handles wort like a brewing yeast: it ferments clean, without phenolic notes, does not ferment maltose or maltotriose, and helps significantly reduce the typical worty flavour that often makes non-alcoholic beers taste more like sweet wort than beer. A patented technology from the University of California Davis also helps limit the formation of sulphur compounds.
Where non-alcoholic beers fall short
The beer is not watery, though. According to the producer, roughly as much residual extract remains as in a beer of normal strength. What is missing is the alcohol.
And alcohol carries more of the flavour than it seems: body, fullness and depth of taste. When it practically disappears, the whole sensory balance of the beer shifts and the result feels thin.
ISY Enhance: mannoproteins instead of bags of maltodextrin
ISY Enhance is an inactivated yeast autolysate rich in polysaccharides and mannoproteins. These naturally give beer body and fullness, which is exactly what a non-alcoholic beer lacks.
It is added to the whirlpool at 20–40 g/hl: lower doses for light beers and fermentations with a high sugar share, higher doses for fuller and more hop-forward styles. According to the producer, the required doses are up to 50 times lower than with maltodextrin: one kilogram replaces up to 50 kg of maltodextrin, with no heavy bags to carry and no risk of scalding when pouring into hot wort.
You will appreciate the second effect in hop-forward beers: polysaccharides and oligosaccharides bind polyphenols and so soften harsher bitterness and astringency, which easily get out of balance without alcohol. ISY Enhance is gluten-free.
Putting it together
A lower original gravity and mashing at higher temperatures decide how many fermentable sugars there will be in the wort at all. LoNa makes sure only a small part of them ferments. And ISY Enhance gives the beer back the fullness that alcohol would otherwise provide.