(WXYZ) — Detroit-based Eastern Market Brewing Co. is launching a line of non-alcoholic beers, just in time for Dry January.
According to EMBC, the brewery had been experimenting with draft versions of the non-alcoholic beer for much of 2022 but this is the first time the beer is available in cans to-go.
There are two flavors: non-alcoholic grapefruit sour and non-alcoholic tangerine sour, and they will be sold at the brewery and at several stores including Busch's, Total Wine and independent retailers in metro Detroit. You can also get it at EMBC's sister locations Ferndale Project and Lincoln Tap.
In 2021, the brewery began partnering with Minnesota-based ABV Technology to install an equalizer machine at the production facility, which uses dual-stage vacuum separation to take one input, a beer with alcohol, and turn it into two outputs – a hard seltzer with the same ABV and a beer with most of the flavor input but less than .5% ABV.
“When we began contemplating the NA market and learned about ABV Technology’s machine, my first reaction was that it sounded too good to be true. We could take any of our beers, run it through the machine, and not only get an NA version of the beer, but also a hard seltzer output,” said Dayne Bartcht, the managing Partner of Eastern Market Brewing Co. “So we loaded up a car with kegs, drove to Minnesota, and sure enough, it worked. It was the best NA beer I’ve tasted.”
Brewers found that the sours provided the most flavor, so they started with gose-style sours.
