As more craft breweries develop low- or no-alcohol offerings, explore beyond-beer beverages, or push their products into farther-flung regions, pasteurization has become more commonplace. It’s also become more important to ensuring product quality and safety.
However, these methods—whether it’s high-temperature, short-time flash pasteurization before packaging or applying carefully measured doses of heat and time to packaged product in a tunnel or batch pasteurizer—are expensive and energy-intensive. They also often have inescapable negative flavor impacts on fragile brews.
However, thermal pasteurization is old tech. Louis Pasteur figured out his version of the eponymous process about 160 years ago, and his methods aren’t the only game in town anymore.
There are new approaches to microbial stability coming to market from the fields of chemistry, raw physics, and materials science. As nonalcoholic beer continues to drive revenue and innovation and as many breweries diversify their product portfolios, some intrepid brewers are taking these new methods out for a spin.