After six years of trial and error, Deschutes Brewery thinks it can put a cap on its latest nonalcoholic beer, Fresh Squeezed IPA.

The nonalcoholic version of the brewery’s popular beer should hit store shelves next week and has already soared to the top of the heap at the brewery’s taproom and pubs, said Peter Skrbek, Deschutes Brewery CEO.

During that research and development process, the brewery explored all the established methods to remove alcohol from its bestselling beers, Skrbek said. Some methods caused the beer to lose flavor, others to change the aroma.

Reverse osmosis to keep brew hop-forward

Deschutes landed on using reverse osmosis in combination with other patented techniques to retain the hop-forward flavor and aroma of Fresh Squeezed IPA while keeping the alcohol below 0.5% by volume, he said.

“Beer is alive, and when you undergo fermentation, the impact on flavor is broad,” Skrbek said. “We are using the reverse osmosis approach, but with a secondary fermentation. You keep the flavor and aroma, but it’s all done cold. It’s very novel.”

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Bend-area non-alcoholic brews beating market expectations 

Using this approach, Deschutes now will have two beers to enter into this growing segment of the craft beer market: Fresh Squeezed IPA and a nonalcohol version of Black Butte Porter, which entered the market in 2022.

Nonalcoholic beer a growing consumer segment

Craft brewers have seen a slump in sales, but the nonalcoholic segment has expanded as a growing number of consumers want to moderate their consumption habits.

The nonalcoholic beer market is anticipated to grow 5.5% over the next 10 years, according to Global Market Insights, a market research consulting company.

“Nonalcoholic beer requires sophisticated technology for the production of these beers,” said Ben Edmunds, president of the Oregon Brewers Guild. “The processes required are quite expensive and cost prohibitive for small breweries. It’s definitely an area that folks are focusing on in Oregon and nationally.”

Crux Fermentation Project, another Central Oregon brewer, has brewed a nonalcoholic IPA beer, NøMø, for about two years.

$5 million investment in new brewing technique

At Deschutes, the goal was to craft a nonalcoholic beer offering a flavor that mirrored its alcoholic version, sold under the same name, Fresh Squeezed. The brewery partnered with Colorado-based Sustainable Beverage Technology to use BrewVo, a fermentation process used in making nonalcoholic beer.

The brewery has invested $5 million in the development of nonalcoholic brewing using this technology. A 65,000-pound tunnel pasteurizer was installed at the Bend brewery so the beer can be shelf-stable. Now both nonalcoholic beers will be brewed in house.

“We were working hard at trying to figure out how to deliver an unsacrificed brew that has hop aroma and hop taste,” Skrbek said. “We can get remarkably close. It’s supercool and totally natural. Fans of Fresh Squeezed don’t have to switch to another beer.”

Deschutes Brewery expanding to all 50 states

In addition to the launch of this new nonalcoholic beverage, Deschutes plans to expand its distribution footprint to all 50 states by the end of next month, he said.

Both the Fresh Squeezed IPA and the Black Butte Porter are the brewery’s No. 1 and No. 2 bestsellers, Skrbek said. Until the brewery can collect sales data on these two products in the nonalcoholic category, it will not launch any new nonalcoholic products, he said.

“There were enormous challenges to preserving the flavors of an IPA nonalcoholic, Skrbek said. “But think about when people drink beer? Why not at lunch or other occasions when it’s not appropriate to have alcohol, but now you can have the beer?

“We’ve only just begun to tap into this market,” Skrbeck said. “There’s no bounds. There is a lot of potential in this sub-segment of the craft market.”