About Nirvana Brewery
Here at Nirvana Brewery, we’re an award-winning no and low brewery based in Leyton, East London. One of the best things about our no and low beers is that we’ve never done anything else. We’ve not transitioned over to no and low and don’t make full alcohol versions. No, we love alcohol-free beer here so much that our brewery is completely dedicated to it, and has been from day one. The Original AF UK Brewery.
If you're looking for no and low beer, you’ve probably heard of some of the big names producing their alcohol-free ranges, attempting to pick up on this up-and-coming market. Or maybe you’ve heard of some smaller, dedicated brands like ours, that focus solely on no and low. Either way, you’re reading this now because you’re curious about what the world of no and low can hold for you, and we’re here to let you know why Nirvana Brewery is a great start for your journey.
As we’ve mentioned before, the world of no and low has many different types of brands competing within it. And we’re here to help guide you through what to expect from each of these.
Craft Beer Brands
What exactly is a craft beer? It’s pretty much any beer that isn’t mass-produced, with a focus on quality ingredients and a traditional brewery. Nirvana is a craft brewery with a key focus on using quality ingredients and traditional brewing techniques. This allows us to be much more creative with flavours and gives each batch of our beer a slight difference.
As a craft brewery, we simply cannot produce beer on the same scale as brands such as Heineken and Guinness. And, quite frankly, we don’t want to. We take great care and pride in the production of our beer and enjoy the ability to experiment and create new flavours. Something that these bigger brands take out of beer to focus on the masses.
Our beers are all brewed with 0.5% or below in mind, so we use different brewing and fermentation techniques to ensure that the beer doesn’t go above this level. When a big brewery moves over to this side of the market, they tend to use distillation or evaporation (dealcoholisation) techniques to remove the alcohol from the original blend, which can alter the flavour of the beer.
These days there has been a lot of development in the world of alcohol-free brewing and some of the more modern breweries are no longer using dealcoholisation. But brewing a good tasting beer under 0.5% is still really challenging and even more so when it’s not a brewery’s main focus. Things are different at Nirvana. Because we spend all our time focused on how to brew the best no-alcohol beer, we have encountered all the pitfalls going and created innovative recipes using the newest technologies in yeast, ingredients and dealcoholisation to achieve the best outcome for each individual style of beer. Trust us, you’ll get a much better no/low experience with Nirvana 😉.
Dedicated No and Low Brands
There has recently been a large increase in the number of dedicated no-and-low brands joining us on our mission to create quality no-and-low beer. Days Brewing is a popular one, you’ve probably seen them in stores or in restaurants nationwide. You’ve also possibly heard of Lucky Saint, or maybe even Infinite Session.
These are all dedicated alcohol-free brands, but not dedicated breweries. They use a brewing partner to make their products and therefore are more or less limited to the one method of no-alcohol brewing that brewer works with.
Days Brewing for example focuses on the 0.0% element of alcohol-free. But, did you know that even a banana can contain up to 0.4% ABV? Realistically, alcohol-free beverages can be up to 0.5% before needing to be classed as low alcohol. At Nirvana Brewery our focus is not on perfecting a 0.0% blend (though we do have some of those if you’re interested 😉). Our focus instead lies on giving our customers a range of beers to enjoy for different occasions.
Another limitation of using a brewing partner with only one method of AF brewing is that it there’s less room for product variation. Have you noticed that most other AF breweries only have 2 types of beer on offer? Here at Nirvana, because we use an array of brewing methods our core range consists of 7 delicious Beers, all with their own ABV and flavour. We also release limited edition seasonal blends, such as chocolate porters and Lemon Goses.
There is something for everyone here at Nirvana Brewery!
