Making Sierra Nevada Non-Alcoholic Trail Pass
To make non-alcoholic beer, “the two divergent paths are: you can make it without alcohol, or you can take the alcohol out,” says James Conery, Innovation Brewmaster at Sierra Nevada.
We make non-alcoholic Trail Pass using the first approach, which means we hyper-control the brewing process, namely mashing and fermentation. Mashing is when brewers mix hot water and grains, which creates sugars. For non-alcoholic beer, to say it plainly, we mash to get only the simplest types of sugars — glucose, sucrose, and fructose; it’s the more complex sugars (maltose) that, in the presence of hungry yeast, will yield high volumes of alcohol. But we also don’t use our typical ale or lager yeast strain in Trail Pass.
“The yeast we use is purposefully designed so it can only metabolize the less complex sugars,” James says, “and we mash so there’s already a low amount of them in the wort. So during fermentation, you end up with just a little bit of alcohol, that 0.5% threshold.”
The other path — alcohol removal, or dealcoholization — often entails either vacuum distillation, which lowers the boiling point of alcohol, or using a membrane filtering technology to better isolate the alcohol before distillation. For Trail Pass IPA and Trail Pass Golden, using traditional brewing methods felt truer to our craft values and, frankly, delivers a product that tastes like beer.
Finding The Right Yeast For Trail Pass
As far back as early 2018, before Trail Pass was even an idea, we started experimenting with non-alcoholic brews. James Conery, our Innovation Brewmaster, remembers those inaugural experiments as, well, lackluster.
“A lot of the early [non-alcoholic] yeast strains produced off characteristics,” he says. “Quite a few of them were hybrids of Belgian strains, so you would get the phenolic spice flavors or, you know, what we call hot-dog water and those kind of things.”
And if it wasn’t odd flavors, it was alcohol inconsistency; one batch would be 0.5% ABV, the next would shoot way above — can’t have that. After trying countless yeasts, including non-Saccharomyces strains, we paused the project.
“The science was not good enough with [non-alcoholic yeast] products,” Conery says. “It just so happens that we stumbled across this new yeast that was being developed by Lallemand, and that’s really where we kicked it off again.”
That breakthrough yeast, a hybrid of beer and wine strains, does the good things and prevents the bad things. It keeps fermentations below 0.5% ABV, but it also wipes out sulfur compounds and off-flavors. Instead, this yeast ferments clean and bright, allowing other ingredients to pop, like the pine and citrus from Amarillo and CTZ hops in Trail Pass IPA or the smooth malt in Trail Pass Golden.
