Our first ever alcohol free lager has crash landed! How exciting. Meet Astro-nought - a crisp and clean lager with a hint of lime zest freshness.
With a crushably light taste, this 0.5% marvel is the perfect thirst quencher for any spacewalk, spacerun or spacesitdown.
To celebrate the launch of this eternally drinkable classic, we’ve answered some questions that you want to know about alcohol free beers.
It’s not boring, we promise.
What actually is alcohol free beer?
To put it simply, it’s beer made with water, malt, yeast and hops. The yeast we use to brew Astro-nought and Lazer Crush (which is called Hansen NEER, if you’re interested) eats up all the sugar in the malt without creating the byproduct of alcohol.
Yeast normally eats sugar and produces CO2 and ethanol, but Hansen NEER produces plenty of CO2, and almost no ethanol.
So that’s how our alcohol free beers are born. Pretty cool, right?
How do you make alcohol free beer?
The same way you make regular beer really. At least that’s how we make our alcohol free beer here at Beavertown Brewery. The only difference is the type of yeast we use (see above).
We also have to pasteurise our alcohol free beers afterwards (because alcohol protects beer from nasties like bacteria, so without the alcohol you need the pasteurisation).
And what’s pasteurisation? Well, that’s A WHOLE other thing we don’t need to get into right now.
How many calories are in alcohol free beers?
The short answer - some.
The long answer - it entirely depends on the beer and the process. Our alcohol free beers are 22kCal per 100ml for Astro-Nought and 27kCal per 100ml for Lazer Crush.
Low calorie and alcohol free don’t always correlate though. For example, Nanobot (our 2.8% Session IPA) is 26kCal per 100ml, so it’s less calories than Lazer Crush but more alcohol.
It all depends on what style you go for as a brewery and how dry you want that final beer to be – we tend to go for a pretty dry flavour profile in general, but sometimes breweries leave a bit of extra sugar in the final beer to add to the feeling of weight when you drink it.
But extra sugar equals extra calories. So, in conclusion, the amount of calories in beer really depends on the beer type and the beer process.
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