• Codex
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    55 months ago

    Beer doesn’t usually smell of ethanol, it smells like hops and yeast. Since most AF beers are built to model light ales anyway, I can hardly tell. I’ve also gotten really into mocktails lately and with the right mixes of bitters and syrups most of them are significantly better than real cocktails. With those, that gasoline taste of ethanol is noticeably absent in a good way!

    I know exactly how caffeine affects me though, and would pretty quickly realize I’d been given decaf.

    • Really? I don’t drink, so maybe I’m more sensitive to the smell, but beer of all variety has the same alcohol smell that wine and liquors have. Yeah, there’s hops and yeast in there as well, but there’s also that alcohol smell.

      I actually like that smell oddly enough, but it’s very distinctive. I’m also very used to the smell of yeast (we bake bread fairly often) and malt (I love AF malt beer), but I’m not as familiar with the smell of hops, so I just assume that’s the “beer” smell I’m smelling.

      • @psud@aussie.zone
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        15 months ago

        I like beer and drink a fair bit of it, and make it. I have had some alcohol free beers and have recognised that they were either bad or alcohol free on the first taste, even when I was blind to the lack of alcohol

        Low alcohol can be made good. I have made a 2% stout which tasted good and a 3% hazy pale ale and both taste fine, but you can’t get to low enough alcohol to call it alcohol free through fermentation

        Apparently you can get to alcohol free through reverse osmosis which doesn’t wreck hop flavours (which boiling or vacuum boiling will wreck). Perhaps I haven’t had any alcohol free beer made with reverse osmosis