424: For Jordan Childs of Mash Gang, Extreme Balance Is the Key to Great Nonalcoholic Beer

For Jordan Childs, cofounder and head brewer of the U.K.-based brand Mash Gang, you don’t hit the right balance in nonalcoholic beer by nudging a traditional beer recipe one way or another. “The best beers feel like a cohesive collection of a bunch of spiky parts pulling apart from each other,” he says. “The outlier flavors are what make craft beer interesting.”

If there’s a method for making nonalcoholic beer, he’s tried it, and in this episode he shares the ingredients and processes that don’t make great beer—as well as those that do.

Along the way, Childs discusses:

• their iterative creative process of testing, learning, trashing, and brewing again
• filling the gaps left by the absence of ethanol
• deliberately choosing poorly attenuating ingredients
• how ethanol removal is responsible for “a lot of bad beer”
• taking a low-intervention approach to nonalcoholic beer
• controlling sugar at a finite level and doing everything wrong, on purpose
• using modern hop products and modern food products for greater control
• hops that do and don’t work in nonalcoholic beer
• avoiding the unfermented wort character
• food safety in the nonalcoholic context
  

And more.

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