Nearly a decade ago, Tammer Zein-El-Abedein and his wife, Donna Hockey, had reason to celebrate. Donna had just successfully overcome a breast cancer diagnosis, and so the couple hoped to commemorate the good news in a healthy way.
“We wanted a nonalcoholic beer,” said Zein-El-Abedei in an interview at Smart Kitchen Summit earlier this month. But, according to the former Google executive, they couldn’t find any non-alcoholic beer “outside of the stuff that’s been out for the last 30 or 40 years, which just wasn’t very interesting.”
So they decided to brew their own. Nine months later, in June 2018, the couple’s first beer (and their company Surreal Brewing) was born. It didn’t take long before the plaudits started rolling in, first in the form of a gold medal at the World Beer Awards and, in 2019, the award for the world’s best non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beer.
Since then, the pair have grown their non-alcoholic craft beer lineup, including four different types of IPAs, a Kolsch, and a couple of Porters. They’ve also expanded across the country, getting distribution into states like Virginia, and became the first non-alcoholic beer poured on tap at Disney World.
Experts generally agree there are four ways to make non-alcoholic beer, including “arrested fermentation,” extracting alcohol from brewed beer, watering down beer (um, gross), and simulated fermentation (which skips the fermentation altogether and adds ingredients and enzymes to simulate a similar result). Zein-El-Abedein doesn’t go into the specifics of the company’s brewing techniques but says its patent-pending brewing process is based on chemistry and not special gimmicks.
“The way we approached making our product is based on science,” he said. “We don’t have a special hoodaddy that you pour in, which comes out non-alcoholic. We don’t do any of that stuff. We actually engineered a process from the ground up that is algorithmic.”
If you’d like to listen to our full interview with Zein-El-Abedein, just click below.
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