ADVERTORIAL
HOW WE CREATED CANADA'S
BEST DE-ALCOHOLIZED BEERS. Red Racer’s Street Legal brand of de-alcoholized craft beer products is the best in its class. Unlike other "near beers", by using state-of-the-art technology to remove the alcohol, the beer's full flavour is preserved. De-Alcoholized beer is often derided as flavourless or as a poor substitute for actual beer. With Red Racer’s Street Legal IPA and Pilsner, this view no longer holds true. Here's why. Street Legal starts just like every beer brewed by Red Racer at Central City Brewers + Distillers: with water, barley, hops and yeast. Brewing, fermentation, and clarification all occur as normal. Every Street Legal dealcoholized beer starts off the same as their alcoholic cousins. This is a distinct difference from the arrested fermentation method of producing non-alcoholic beer, which relies on stopping fermentation and using excessive hops and other flavour compounds in an attempt to balance the sweetness of un-fermented wort. All Street Legal de-alcoholized beers fully complete the fermentation process, resulting in a flavour and body consistent with any other beer purchased from the liquor store. Once Street Legal has completed the fermentation and clarification steps of brewing the alcohol needs to be removed. For this, Central City relies on a crossflow filtration de-alcoholization system that utilizes reverse osmosis.
Cross-flow filtration relies on a stream of water running parallel to a stream of finished beer that is separated by a membrane. This membrane allows only water and alcohol to pass through, drawing alcohol from the beer and into the water stream. Once the alcohol is drawn out, de-oxygenated water is added back to reconstitute the beer and make up for the volume lost from the removal of alcohol. Flavour and body are retained through this process, ensuring the final product is as close to the original beer as possible. By removing alcohol using this process, the beer is neither heated nor pasteurized as is the case with the vacuum distillation method for removing alcohol. Vacuum distillation relies on heating the beer until the alcohol evaporates. While most of the alcohol is removed using this method, the secondary effect is that the beer is effectively cooked through this process. The result is a beer that tastes off, and produces a cooked taste, as well as an unappealing mouthfeel for the drinker. Unlike non-alcoholic beers made using arrested fermentation or vacuum distillation, Red Racer’s Street Legal IPA and Pilsner use reverse osmosis to produce beers that are delicious and hard to tell apart from the original, alcoholic versions. Because of this high-tech process, Red Racer Street Legal beers are Canada’s best—and only—craft brewed de-alcoholized beers.
Learn more at centralcitybrewing.com