FAYETTEVILLE — Small organisms can have a big impact. That’s why researchers explored nearly a dozen nontraditional yeast strains to find out which ones could brew the best nonalcoholic beers for a rapidly growing market.
Andew Maust and Scott Lafontaine stand in the pilot brewery of the Center for Beverage Innovation.
WHAT'S BREWING — Research on yeasts for nonalcoholic beer by Andew Maust, left, food science graduate student, and Scott Lafontaine, assistant professor of food chemistry, will help brewers develop products for a growing market. (U of A System Division of Agriculture photo)
The Center for Beverage Innovation and Lafontaine Lab — including researchers with the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas and the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station — evaluated 11 commercially available yeasts to identify their strengths based on chemical analysis and sensory panel opinions. The study was published in the ACS Food Science and Technology journal on April 15. The experiment station is the research arm of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
“These findings provide brewers with actionable insights to select yeasts that align with desired nonalcoholic beer characteristics and enable them to produce style-specific, high-quality nonalcoholic beers,” said Scott Lafontaine, assistant professor of food chemistry in the food science department, co-director of the Center for Beverage Innovation and corresponding author of the study.
Most of the yeasts that were tested in the study are strains that have been developed or screened to not ferment maltose, the primary sugar created from malted barley in the beermaking process.
While physically extracting and removing alcohol from ordinarily fermented beverages requires costly equipment, biologically limiting alcohol from forming during the fermentation process opens the nonalcoholic beer space to a wider group of small-scale brewers, Lafontaine noted.
Andrew Maust, a Bumpers College graduate student working in the Lafontaine Lab/Center for Beverage Innovation, and lead author of the study, said that while these “maltose-negative” yeasts still ferment simpler sugars like glucose, fructose and sometimes sucrose, not fermenting maltose results in low- or nonalcoholic beer.
“Typically, when people think of the role of yeast in brewing, they only think of the creation of ethanol and carbon dioxide from the consumption of sugars,” Maust said. “That reaction occurs, but the beauty of yeast is that they also produce a wide range compounds that become the soul of beer.”
Classic yeast-driven flavors include fruity, spicy and floral notes, as well as the ability to biologically transform the rest of the raw materials in the brewing process, Maust added.
“Over several hundreds of years, we’ve domesticated and evolved these organisms to act exactly how we want them, often leading to yeast choice as a driver of regional beer flavors and styles,” Maust explained.
Growing market
The timing of this study and its findings are critical, Lafontaine said, as nonalcoholic beer remains one of the few bright spots in the craft beer segment amid the category’s rapid expansion. In the United States, nonalcoholic beers are defined as containing 0.5 percent alcohol by volume or less, while international definitions typically range from 0.05 to 1.2 percent.
Consumer demand for nonalcoholic beer has surged due to health and wellness trends. According to a 2024 Statista forecast published in 2024, nonalcoholic beer production in the U.S. has grown for 10 consecutive years and is projected to increase another 13.5 percent by 2029. In Germany, nonalcoholic beer makes up roughly 5 percent of the beer market and is even marketed as a post-workout beverage.
Despite this momentum and although brands are getting much better, Maust said, flavor remains a key hurdle. “A common barrier to adoption in the U.S. is the perception that nonalcoholic beers lack flavor and depth compared to their full-strength counterparts,” Maust said.
Lafontaine has been studying nonalcoholic beer since 2019, with earlier work focused on characterizing commercial products to understand which flavor chemistry and sensory attributes of existing nonalcoholic beers best matched consumer expectations. This new study marks a significant evolution, Lafontaine said, by moving from analyzing finished beers to actively developing and evaluating nonalcoholic beer formulations in the lab. The work builds on Lafontaine’s previous research published in 2020 looking at factors that influence flavor and American consumer preference toward nonalcoholic beer.
Up to this point, Lafontaine said, most beverage design work in the nonalcoholic beer category has been to develop them as “lager-like “But the Lafontaine Lab team wanted to see what maltose-negative yeasts might be suitable to replicate other full-strength commercial styles, including pale ale, lager and wheat beers. To match up their experimental maltose-negative beers with these commercial styles, the researchers used sensomics, a combination of chemical and sensory analyses.
