WANTED: Beer Chemist to help solve the mystery of a non-alcoholic malt beverage

[flippydoodle]

I'm looking for a brewer or beer chemist to help us reverse engineer a non-alcoholic malt beverage. The particular beverage is produced and primarily sold overseas, and we are hoping to find a similar or improved recipe for production in the US. Problem is we are not professionals . . . .well at least professional brewers. We are pretty good at drinking the malt beverage though

We know the ingredients (but not he proportions). We know that the beverage requires malted hops and is eventually carbonated, but they find a way to make the thing non-alcoholic.

Anyway, if you'd like the challenge send me an email to flippydoodle@yahoo.com

We're happy to provide samples of the product we are trying to reverse engineer and will pay a small fee ($500) to a pro that can crack the mystery . . . which in all likelihood you'll be able to do in a few days.

Thanks for the consideration.

[einhorn]

Is this in reference to Bionade?

[SocieteTravis]

I hear those malted hops are really hard to find.

[dwasak]

google can give you the answer for free.

[brauer]

Malted hops?!?! WTF is that?!?

[Lex]

Malted hops?!?! WTF is that?!?

Where did you think "crystal" hops came from.

[Scott M]

Makes a person scratch their head.

Just a thought, but wouldn't you produce an unhopped wort, ferment it, then boil off the alcohol and rehop during the boil off process?

Somehow, beer without alcohol is hop soda!

[gardenofsound]

This is Malta. Very popular in the Caribbean.

I don't think it's practical on a very small scale to bottle it, but kegging it, even in corny kegs would be doable.

Make a standard wort as if home-brewing, using your desired hops and malts. The Malta I've had seems to taste most like a brown ale or porter wort.

Stir in some caramel during the boil, then cool... get it into a fermenter and pitch yeast--just like homebrewing. At some point, when the taste seems right to you (usually when the alcohol is <=2%), rack out into a kettle and boil out the alcohol. This also serves to kill the yeast.

Then cool it into a cleaned, sanitized keg, and force carbonate.

The reason bottling is not feasible is that, in small scale operations, force carbonating bottles is impractical. If you were to skip the final, yeast killing boil, then bottles would invariably explode. Hell, even a keg at that point would probably not be able to withstand the pressure, and even if it did, pouring a glass would be like dealing with a shaken bottle of champagne, except with much greater head retention.

Anyways... you really don't need a beer-chemist for this. Malta is essentially a near-beer. If you're trying to figure out the specific ingredients used in a certain product, then maybe you're best off asking a qualified beer taster who may be able to diagnose the specific hops and maybe even the malts but at that point, getting proportions right is going to be a complete act of trial and error.

[el_mocoso]

Anyways... you really don't need a beer-chemist for this. Malta is essentially a near-beer. If you're trying to figure out the specific ingredients used in a certain product, then maybe you're best off asking a qualified beer taster who may be able to diagnose the specific hops and maybe even the malts but at that point, getting proportions right is going to be a complete act of trial and error.

You forgot to tell them where to send the check.