Robin Shepard
Isaac Showaki, left, and Sam Green in the Octopi taproom with their Untitled Art non-alcoholic beers.
Until recently, consumers interested in drinking non-alcoholic beer haven’t had much choice — options were maybe a straightforward lager-like style or an amber. But interest in non-alcoholic beers is growing and it’s a new frontier for craft beer makers, who have so far ceded this market to the big breweries.
“This is going to be a big part of our growth for the foreseeable future,” says Octopi Brewing owner Isaac Showaki, who is positioning the brewery to be a major national player in non-alcoholic beer production. “It could become 20-25 percent of our total beer production next year.” Non-alcoholic beer accounted for about 15 percent of his brewery’s output in September.
“You see all these crazy styles and there’s a group of drinkers that wants them without alcohol, either by choice or for medical reasons,” says Sam Green, who leads Octopi’s team on non-alcoholic beer production.
Waunakee’s Octopi is known for its contract brewing but also for its own line of experimental beers and hard seltzers under the Untitled Art label. Octopi is in the midst of a $72 million expansion slated to be completed by next summer; its $2.5 million de-alcoholization equipment was installed about a year ago. The goal is for Octopi to become a 1 million-barrel facility that co-packages across a range of products and U.S. clients.
Non-alcoholic beer in the U.S. is currently a small slice of overall beer consumption, comprising less than 0.5 percent of sales. However, industry forecasting groups like International Wine & Spirts Research predict tremendous growth in non-alcoholic products. The category saw nearly 40 percent increases in both 2019 and 2020.
This has been noticed by large multinational breweries, which have come out with new beers like Heineken 0.0, Guinness Zero and Budweiser Zero, expanding the traditional non-alcoholic choices of O’Doul’s, Sharp’s and Beck’s.
The cost of the equipment and the space it requires in a brewhouse partially explain why U.S. craft breweries haven’t pursued brewing non-alcoholic beers sooner. Octopi, as a regional contract brewer, is able to justify the investment. “This is so new to the craft brewing industry, there is really no one we can call and ask for advice when it comes to how de-alcoholization works with craft beer styles,” Showaki says.
Since installing the equipment, the brewery has made more than a half-dozen non-alcoholic beers, mostly in limited one-offs, including a chocolate milk stout, a weisse with passion fruit, a watermelon gose, a juicy IPA, a West Coast IPA and an Italian pilsner. One of the latest is called S’mores Dark Brew.
This summer Octopi made a non-alcoholic version of Lakefront’s Riverwest Stein Beer, a mainstay of the Milwaukee brewery since the early 1990s. Showaki is planning to make more of it this fall.
There are several approaches to making non-alcoholic beer. Some small breweries use arrested fermentation — that basically stops yeast from producing alcohol. However, the process can be unpredictable and result in “green beer,” a term for unfermented, worty, sugary flavors.
Another, more expensive approach, and more common in very large breweries, involves vacuum distillation, requiring low pressure that allows alcohol to evaporate.
At Octopi, Showaki uses a membrane filtration system with high pressures and filters to strip the alcohol out of the beer. He feels it’s best for maintaining the beer’s original qualities. Octopi takes a style (ranging from pilsners to imperial stouts) and ferments the beer completely before running it through the membrane filtration system. With some styles, adjuncts can be used for additional flavor and body to replace what is taken out during filtration.
When alcohol is removed by a filtering process, the calories are also reduced, according to Showaki. His non-alcoholic beers fall under 0.5 percent ABV, the threshold for being called non-alcoholic, and most have fewer than 100 calories.
Non-alcoholic beers can be less stable, especially when other flavors are added. Octopi uses a pasteurization process for longer shelf life. All this increases the cost of the beer, up to 20 percent for some beers.
Untitled Art’s non-alcoholic Juicy IPA has been the best seller so far, says Showaki, but the brewery’s non-alcoholic Italian pilsner may be a more impressive offering, as it maintains the character of a pilsner — a style that doesn’t allow a brewer to cover up off flavors or lack of body with adjuncts.
Several Untitled Art beers are available either with or without alcohol. While drinkers may be tempted to do side-by-side comparisons, that’s not the point of releasing them at the same time, says Showaki. Brewers split the batch in two, with half becoming beer with alcohol and the other run through the de-alcohol process.
Showaki is currently working with at least one national company and preparing for a major rollout of several non-alcoholic beers next year. He estimates that non-alcoholic beer brewed at Octopi will be in 40 different states in 2022: “Almost every craft client we have is in the process of launching its first non-alcoholic beer.”
