NA Innovation at Summit and 'On Boilermakers'

The Tulip and Schooner for Friday, May 9, 2025

The Tulip and Schooner is edited and primarily written by Louis Livingston-Garcia.

I knew places would close, but it’s still hard to see breweries actually close. One of the latest, Bent Brewstillery, stings. I used to write copy for beer labels there years ago, helped can, and generally would have great, tipsy evenings there with friends and owner Bartley Blume. 

While this is due to retirement, and I imagine how difficult it was law-wise to run a combo brewery and distillery, a closure is a closure. Even if it stays an adult beverage spot. 

It makes me think of succession issues in beer, something often written about. What happens when your kids don’t want to work in the beer industry? And with the industry as tough to be in as ever, just, oof. In a world actively crumbling due to big business and greed, I find it all so exhausting. 

I was in Rochester this past week hanging about (I had time to run two miles on a path I used to run nearly each day I lived there) and chatting with friends, but also chatting with Humble Forager’s Austin Jevne about Humble Forager for a future story. 

So much of that brand’s journey has changed in its five years of existence. From pandemic, to tariffs, to contract-brewing woes, and unknown legal issues – it’s been a lot. It would have been easier to shutter the brand while being so busy with kids – Jevne has three – and life in general. 

I know I’m tired and often turn down freelance opportunities because, well, yes, I’m tired, but I want what energy I do have to go toward pretending to be a dinosaur with my toddler and holding our baby. Leaving the basement office to hang with my buddies is the best – and I write about cool things for a living. And I’d still rather get headbutted by my little pachy… pachy a self a sore us… pachycephalosaurus? OK, that might be wrong, and Leo will once again correct me on how to pronounce the dino he likes to mimic before headbutting me for the umpteenth time. 

I can’t imagine running a business on top of everything like kids and the world at large. It often seems like we’re damned. 

I wonder what the beer landscape would have been like had we not had the pandemic and every little and big evil along the way. I think there was always going to be a bad beer shakeout, but we’ve lost some top-tier breweries, or even parts of them, like Fair State losing some of its business operations post bankruptcy. 

Anywho, more breweries bite the dust. 

And I hate it. 

INTERVIEW
Brewer Damian McConn on Summit’s NA beer endeavors.
By Loren Green 

Courtesy of Summit Brewing

Craft beer is an ongoing evolution; ideally, it’s a balance of growth, technology and changing tastes, always in close balance with tradition. Summit’s growth has mirrored this evolution, always emphasizing traditional beer character and profile, often looking to Europe for inspiration. They launched the Nialas (pronounced  NEE Uh LIS) line of non-alcoholic beers in 2022, and recently unveiled a mixed pack with four housemade options. You can get them at the Ratskeller taproom in Saint Paul, but also at area liquor stores, other brewery taprooms, and even grocery store shelves.

NA beer has come a long way. We talked with industry veteran and Chief Brewing Officer Damian McConn (pictured below) to learn what makes Nialas different from other nonalcoholic beers on the market, and what it has in common with so-called regular beer too.

HEAVY TABLE: How long have you been in the beer business and do you remember when you brewed your first NA?

Courtesy of Summit Brewing

DAMIAN MCCONN: I’ve been in the business for 25 years. I started brewing nonalcoholic beer about four years ago. We looked at the NA space as an opportunity for growth and, having a European background where nonalcoholic beer has been growing in the last 10 years, I wanted to see if we could replicate that here in the local market.

When I was at Guinness we made Kaliber NA beer, so it extends back to my time at Guinness 20-odd years ago. I wanted to see if we could improve upon the flavor profile. The NA beers at Summit have more flavor and character, quite frankly, than a brand like Kaliber. But I also was leaning on the knowledge I gained from my time at Guinness to develop these beers here at Summit.

HT: What is your brewing process? Do you ferment and then remove alcohol?

MCCONN: At Guinness they typically use fractional distillation, reverse osmosis, and processes like vacuum distillation to remove the alcohol. Our process focuses on the mashing profile of the wort, the ingredients, the yeast strain, and the fermentation profile. We’re not creating a lot of alcohol in the first place, so we don’t have to remove the alcohol. The challenge with these processes that are built around removing the alcohol is that they are also removing a lot of the flavor components. They beat the living daylights out of the beer. By not creating alcohol in the first place, we don’t have to take these aggressive processes to remove that.

HT: So these fall below 0.5% naturally?

MCCONN:  The biotransformation that exists during fermentation gives us the flavor profile that we want, but we’re not having to beat up the beer with an RO process or fractional distillation or vacuum distillation.

That’s what I learned at Guinness. I didn’t want to replicate their process because I thought it was too harsh on the product.