Made it: Hop Water aka non-alcoholic beer - easy, minimal equipment
Here's how I made a nice hop water, aka non-alcoholic IPA, in a 1 gallon batch for just a few bucks with minimal equipment and fuss
TL:DR - To make a good hop water, take an extract homebrew recipe you like and remove the base malt. Do the brew the same but add the bottling sugar at the end of the boil, pitch yeast right into your cooled wort, and bottle straight from the kettle.
But, like, why?
Brief divergence on non-alcoholic beer. There's two ways I know to make it. You can make regular beer and then remove the alcohol by boiling, freezing, or finding some specialized membrane. That would be do-able at a large scale but impractical at a homebrew scale. And the boiling and freezing methods are generally murder on the flavor. Or you can make it so that very little alcohol is ever formed. The latter is what I did, and it came out great.
I already make a small range of homebrewed beverages such as hard cider and beer, so I looked around for hop water recipes on the internet. Clawhammer, a homebrew supply company, has the recipe everyone seems to link back to. But to my scientific and perhaps reductionist mind, it seemed to include steps that weren't needed and remove steps that would matter.
I want flavors and aromas from malt, hops, and yeast. I don't want a high alcohol content. What do I do when I want a higher alcohol content in a brew? I add more fermentable sugars. So to make a near-zero brew, all you really need to do is reduce the fermentable sugars to close to zero.
So let's go.
Ingredients:
5 quarts of charcoal-filtered or otherwise dechlorinated water
1 cup of honey malt barley, or a different flavoring malt or blend of your liking
3 tbsp hop pellets, I used 2 tbsp challenger and 2 tbsp citra
1 pinch of Irish moss (optional)
1 packet of ale yeast
Equipment:
A large stock pot or brew kettle with at least 2 gal capacity and a lid
Some way to cool the kettle quickly. I used a copper coil wort chiller, an ice bucket or even a winter patio would work too
Either little socks/teabags for your malt and hops, a filter, or both
A long, smooth, metal spoon
Bottles and caps, about 12
A funnel
Thermometer
Star-san or some other sanitizer, mixed up in a spray bottle
Method, which takes about 2 hours but they're pretty chill hours:
1) Bring 5 quarts of water to boil in a large stockpot or brew kettle. Lower heat to simmer.
2) Put 1 cup of malt/barley in, using a grain sock or giant tea bag if you want (makes the bottling step easier. This is going to boil for 60 minutes total.
3) Along with the malt, add 2 tbsp challenger hops, these are your bittering hops. I put them in tea bags.
4) While that's gently simmering, sanitize your bottles and caps.
4) After 40 minutes, add 1 tbsp citra hops, these are your flavoring hops.
5) After 5 more minutes, if you're using a copper coil wort chiller or any other cooling method that comes in direct contact with the liquid, put that in the pot now. Also put the spoon in. This is to sanitize those things. Also add 3 tbsp table sugar or bottling sugar, if you're carbonating it in the bottle. Skip this if you're kegging.
6) Hook up or otherwise prep your cooling method, whatever that is.
7) After 4 more minutes, add the last 1 tbsp of citra hops, these are your aroma hops. From this point forward, sanitize anything that's going to go in or over your kettle by spraying it with Star-san.
8) Cool it down, stirring with the spoon to speed things along. Leave the spoon in there till the very end. If you ever take it out, re-sanitize with the Star-san.
9) When the temperature gets below 110° F (no problem if it's lower than that), sprinkle 1/4 to a 1/2 of the yeast packet over top of your liquid. Give it a couple of minutes to soak, then stir it well.
10) Bottle it. Lots of good ways to do this. I sanitized a 1 gal glass apple cider jug, put a filter in my funnel, and slowly poured the brew into that. Then I poured from the glass jug directly into the bottles. and capped it. Point is, you want your brew, just the liquid, to go into your bottles. I've heard re-used plastic soda bottles work fine for this, though I haven't tried it. Leave a couple inches of empty space above the liquid level below the cap.
11) Wait. Sigh, the hard part. Mine sat for about a week in a dark corner of the laundry room, probably 60 to 70 °F for two weeks. At that point they were plenty fizzy enough. And they taste great!
I should note, using this method, I did get some yeast mass at the top of each bottle. Not the best look, but it doesn't hurt the drinking experience at all in my opinion. The fizzing of opening and pouring them mixed it in, and to me it was undetectable.
So, if you don't want to pay a lot of $$ for professionally made hop water; if you want a non-alcoholic beer that's more like an IPA than a pilsner; if you're looking to cut down your drinking but like the ceremony, hops, and bubbles of beer; give this a try.