Alcohol-free beer specialist Big Drop Brewing Co has become the UK’s most decorated British brewer at the World Beer Awards.
This year’s medal haul includes the acclaim of ‘world’s best’ for two of its 0.5% ABV beers — Paradiso Citra IPA and Galactic Milk Stout. Now with seven world’s best titles under its belt, three of them for Galactic, Big Drop not only tops the table of UK brewers, but can lay claim to having the world’s most awarded beer of all time, alcohol free or otherwise.
Galactic — described as rich, unctuous, and an absolutely decadent treat of a beer — has won 20 of Big Drop’s 70 international beer awards since its launch in 2016.
Not all these awards have been specifically for alcohol-free beer, however, with both of this year’s winners having previously beaten full-strength rivals in blind tastings.
Paradiso, for example, was the UK’s winner in the specialty IPA category of last year’s World Beer Awards, nudging 6% ABV entries into second and third place. Likewise, Galactic was out-performing regular stouts in the World Beer Awards before it had its own alcohol-free category.
Rob Fink, founder and chief excutive of Big Drop, said: “When we started out, we decided that we shouldn’t be aiming to make AF beers better but, rather, creating great tasting beers that just happen to be AF.
“As there weren’t many awards around for AF beer at the time, we entered the normal categories instead. The results speak for themselves and reinforce our belief that AF beers, made in the right way by expert brewers using carefully selected ingredients, don’t have to compromise on taste.”
Fink claims the secret to Galactic’s success is its ‘brew-to-strength’ or reduced amylase brewing technique, pioneered by Big Drop and seen as game-changing for the category, which has often been considered a ‘distress purchase’. This technique allows the beer to be fully fermented without the need to extract alcohol once it had been brewed. By remaining under the ‘alcohol free’ threshold of 0.5% ABV throughout the whole process, Big Drop can retain the flavours and texture that would have traditionally been stripped out by removing the alcohol.
