In the history of DC Brau, there have been a few pale ales. They’ve come and gone and you probably won’t remember them compared to the red, blue, or green cans on your local store’s shelves right now. For example, you’ve likely never heard of Green Card, a pale ale DC Brau brewed with Firestone Walker at their Bladensburg Road facility, and part of that is because the beer was never canned. Neither was Everyday Junglist, hopped with the classic combination of Chinook and Mosaic. But you’ve surely seen The Public, one of the best-selling pale ales in Washington, DC. But there is another pale ale coming that is nothing like any of the pale ales before it. It’s non-alcoholic. Meet Brau’s newest pale ale, NA Brau.
NA Brau is modeled after Public, but is not “NA Public”–the brewery understandably doesn’t want any consumer confusion. That said, from a brewing perspective the grain bill is similar to The Public, and the hops are the same: Centennial and El Dorado.
The first question we asked DC Brau CEO and co-founder Brandon Skall is what took them so long to make an NA beer. “The technology,” Skall said. The brewery has been discussing this for a few years now. “In order to do it right we needed a separator to remove the alcohol from finished beer, which is capital- and space-prohibitive.” Having purchased that piece of equipment, Brau turned to other technological advances in brewing.
Alcohol has antimicrobial properties, so NA beer risks spoiling–or refermenting, and then becoming alcoholic beer–if not treated. The most common way to do this is “tunnel pasteurization,” in which NA beer is heated to eliminate microbial agents and then cooled. This tunnel takes up a lot of space, and uses a lot of energy. Additionally, some of the volatile flavors from beer we know and love don’t always take kindly to the heat. Instead, Brau chose an innovative solution to prevent spoilage and secondary fermentation: mushrooms. Chinova Bioworks’ product Chiber™ Mushroom Extract is a water and acid solution with fibers extracted from button mushrooms that replaces the tunnel, and it doesn’t take away beer flavor and carbonation when creating an antimicrobial environment.
Some NA beers can taste a bit like wort, the pre-fermentation mixture of liquid and grain. Brau uses a hybrid strain of Lallemand yeast to make NA Brau. If Lallemand sounds familiar, it’s because Port City is using a genetically modified yeast from this company to make their sour beers. Experimental Gose was on tap at the Alexandria brewery earlier in the year and cans of another gose-style ale, Cobblestone Sour, should be out this Friday. By using Lallemand, NA Brau finishes at 0.3% alcohol by volume, below the .5% of many other NA beers. In fact, it will have less alcohol than Kikkoman soy sauce.
Skall and the Brau team are keen observers of national trends in the beer market, having moved into seltzer with the Full Transparency series in 2019. “If you look at national trends, NA is growing” while craft, and even beer overall, is not, he mentions. “NA beer is not just about abstaining, it’s a supplement and complement to regular beer, too… The way people consume alcohol has changed.” It’s not just the younger generation; as craft drinkers age, many of us who came of age during the craft boom are looking to moderate our consumption.
Furthermore, as a Maryland resident, Skall noticed that NA beer can be sold in grocery stores in the state, giving Brau a brand recognition boost. “Whole Foods, Giant,… all these chains have one store, maybe two, that can sell alcohol,” he says. But everyone can sell NA beer. Skall notices a substantial increase in NA sections in these stores, and Brau is a big enough brewery to benefit from it. Seeing NA Brau at a Harris Teeter in Rockville may drive sales at Gilly’s or Downtown Crown.
According to Statista, non-alcoholic beer “revenue, at home is expected to grow annually by 5.13%. They say “[r]evenue, out-of-home (e.g., revenue generated in restaurants and bars) amounts to US$2.8bn in 2024. Revenue, combined amounts to US$6.9bn in 2024.” And with a larger share of the market favoring off-premise (meaning NA beer consumed not at bars, restaurants, concert halls, and stadiums, et cetera) for a bigger billion-dollar chunk, perhaps DC Brau is being savvy with their investment in new technology, equipment, and ingredients.
In the District proper, if you pop into a grocery store you may see anywhere from 10 to 20 different brands of NA beer. On a recent trip to a store in Navy Yard, we counted Lagunitas IPNA, Clausthaler Original and Grapefruit, Partake IPA and Pale, Tsingtao 0.0, Peroni 0.0, Athletic’s IPA, Blonde, Atlética Mexican-Style Copper, and Hazy IPA, Sierra Nevada Trail Pass Golden, Sam Adams Just the Haze NA IPA, and Budweiser Zero. Expand this category to the NA Seltzer/hop water options and we’re over 20 options, though clearly hop water and NA beer are not the same, chemically speaking, and from a brewhouse perspective can be manufactured quite differently.
We’ll also note that NA Brau is not the first NA beer brewed in the District; that honor belongs to Other Half’s All NA Everything, which will be in cans later on this year. Other Half and Hoplark have collaborated on hop waters as well, which have been canned.
So does DC Brau plan to extend their NA offerings the way we’ve seen Athletic and others do? “Based on the success of the [NA] Pale, there could be line extensions into Pilsner and IPA” Skall tells us. Look for cans of NA Brau later on this month.
Jacob Berg and Michael Stein jointly wrote this piece.
