Of all the levers brewers can pull to transform a recipe, texture may be the most underrated. It’s one of the most memorable aspects of any beverage, alcoholic or otherwise. Consider the appeal of champagne, latte, Irish cream, boba tea… heck, even Smooj. Whether you’re describing a beguiling tripel or an indulgent imperial stout, texture is a massive contributor to the overall sensory experience.
Mandy Naglich, the New York City–based author of How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life, attributes texture’s influence to the fact that it’s even more universal than flavor. We perceive aroma and flavor differently, depending on genetics and past experiences. But when it comes to the texture of food and drink, sparkling is sparkling, and crunchy is crunchy.
“As humans, our palates are extremely sensitive to texture,” Naglich says, noting that we can sense grit as small as one-fifth the width of a human hair (about 10 microns) between our teeth. “So, the difference between the soda-pop bubbles in something force-carbonated and the finer fizz of something carbonated during secondary fermentation is massive, as is the mouth-coating slickness of an aged barleywine compared to the light touch of an American lager. And it’s a difference we can all agree upon.”
Brewers are used to adding carbon dioxide to pale ales, porters, and pilsners within an accepted range of volumes. Over the past couple of years, however, drinkers’ minds have been opening to the refreshing possibilities of non- or less-carbonated beverages. From Boston Beer’s Twisted Tea to New Belgium’s “hard refresher” Lightstrike, still drinks have found a footing among fans who say they’re easier to drink and less filling than their bubbly counterparts. There’s even a company, NOCA Beverages, that’s built a national brand based on the premise of noncarbonated alcoholic drinks.
That’s not to say that drinkers are moving away from bubbles en masse. But when brewers are developing new beverages—particularly in the realm of hard teas and lemonades, cider-based cocktails, ready-to-drink cocktails, and the like—dialing back carbonation can be useful. Like alcohol content, bitterness, or residual sugar, carbonation is an ingredient that contributes to the drinker’s overall perception of a beer. Reducing or removing it can help convey something distinct and compelling.
“You can do things with a still product that you can’t do with a carbonated beverage or with a beer,” says Sean Flynn, owner and consultant at Solutions Beverage, based in Missoula, Montana.
In his former role as an R&D brewer at Molson Coors, Flynn worked on noncarbonated trials that eventually informed the launch of the Happy Thursday “spiked refreshers” in 2024. The lack of carbonation opened the door to experimentation with creamy textures and flavors such as strawberry-banana and chocolate. (Neither of those made it to the final, packaged product; the line’s current flavors are Black Cherry, Mango Passionfruit, Pineapple Starfruit, Raspberry Dragonfruit, and Strawberry.)
“If you’ve got the body right, then you can go different routes with your flavoring,” Flynn says. “It was a new thing that we could play around with and see how far we could stretch ourselves.”
Carbonation as a Variable
Of course, CO2 does more than just add bubbles—it has knock-on effects that alter our perception of sweetness, viscosity, flavor, alcohol, and more.
Put another way, carbonation is an important variable in the beverage equation. Change it, and the overall result changes—often in ways that aren’t linear.
Patrick Combs knows this well. As “vice president of liquids” for Denver-based Wilding Brands, he’s overseen the development and packaging of low-carbonation hard tea and lemonade for Stem Ciders, as well as RTD beverages for Wilding’s copacking clients. When formulating something new, he always considers what the level of carbonation will mean for other aspects of the drink. In general, CO2 is an amplifier: It boosts the perception of alcohol, of acidity or “zippiness,” and it generally amplifies aroma and flavor.
Stem’s two brands of hard lemonades, Chill Hard and Sunnyside, help illustrate this. Both are carbonated to the same low level: 1.6 volumes. (While that’s far from still beverage, it’s a level that doesn’t rise to “sparkling” for most drinkers.) However, carbonation and alcohol enhance each other, so Chill Hard (at 6.9 percent ABV) feels less effervescent on the palate than Sunnyside (at 8.5 percent ABV).
The way ABV and carbonation interact here is intentional, Combs says, designed to make Chill Hard slightly easier to sip. “Chill Hard is a little bit more sessionable and lake-friendly,” he says, “and so it’s nice that the carbonation perception in Chill Hard is dramatically lower, in my opinion, than Sunnyside—though it’s only a 1.6 percent ABV difference.”
Low levels of carbonation also mute aroma and flavor. That means that the still beverages Flynn was developing at Molson Coors couldn’t rely on CO2 to carry a lot of flavor to the palate. When aromatic compounds lift from the back of our throats to our nasal receptors, it’s known as retronasal olfaction, and—as many brewers and beer judges know well—it’s critical for our experience of food and drink. Carbon dioxide carries with it a host of important aromatic compounds that would otherwise remain locked in the liquid. (For a fun illustration of this, try sniffing the aroma on a pint of nitro-carbonated Guinness alongside a glass of highly carbonated Duvel.)
“When you don’t have CO2 that’s carrying those out of solution, you’re not getting that aroma hit that you would get when you immediately open a can of beer or take a drink from it,” Flynn says. “For better or worse, you get a lot less aroma off of a still product.”
Combs estimates he could use 30 to 50 percent less raspberry flavor in Stem’s raspberry lemonade if he boosted the CO2 from 1.6 to a beer-standard 2.6 volumes. Because the lemonade can’t rely on all those bubbles to carry its aroma and flavor, he has to dial up the fruit to ensure it punches through.
In Search of Refreshment
Acidity is another critical contribution that carbon dioxide makes to a beverage.
In water, CO2 breaks down into carbonic acid—and even though it lasts just a fraction of a second in that form, that acid affects how drinks taste. It’s also partially responsible for those “crisp” sensations of refreshment we get from sodas or beers—that feeling that makes us say “ahhh” after taking a drink.
Trigeminal perception is another way our palates clock beverages’ refreshment factor: The trigeminal nerve is the largest nerve in the human cranium, and it picks up sensations such as cooling menthol or hot capsaicin. It’s also how the “tingling” feeling of CO2 gets transmitted to our brains, and those tingles tend to sync with our ideas of refreshment. So, while still or lower-carb beverages are actually easier to drink at faster rates, they might not produce the same immediate feeling of refreshment—like the difference between drinking an iced tea and a LaCroix—thanks to the lack of carbonic acid and trigeminal stimulus.
Evens with few or no bubbles, most drinks are designed to be refreshing. That’s where other sources of acidity can come into play.
Jeff Stuffings, cofounder of Jester King in Austin, says he thinks about this in the context of lambic. Traditionally, lambics wouldn’t have been totally degassed, as they develop some fine carbonation while bunged in oak casks. Still, they’re pretty low in carbonation, instead owing their refreshment quotient to the tartness produced by wild bacteria.
“Some of that acid does kind of provide a certain liveliness to the palate that might otherwise belong to carbon dioxide,” Stuffings says. Obviously, lambic beers aren’t precisely formulated the way a hard tea might be, but the natural evolution of this brewing approach produces a beer that is—despite its low carbonation—highly refreshing.
“Technically, the acidity helps with the beer’s balance and mouthfeel, but not because it was engineered that way,” Stuffings says. “It just produces what is right. … I find such beauty in the character of the yeast fermentation and its confluence with the aged hops and that little balance of acidity. I’ve never really been bothered by the fact that it maybe isn’t as lively on the palate.”
In short: If your goal is a refreshing low-carbonation beverage, consider leaning on other sources of acidity to provide a sense of liveliness and “zip” that would otherwise come from the CO2.
The Persnickety Nature of Packaging
Once you’ve fermented a low- or no-carbonation liquid, the challenge is, at best, only half over.
These drinks require special considerations when it comes to kegging and canning. Bottles, with their strong glass walls, are the easiest choice for still beverages. The lack of carbonation also opens the door for nontraditional packages, such as Twisted Tea’s bag-in-box “Party Pouch.”
“The biggest issue is really package stability,” says Chuck Zadlo, CEO at the Craftsmith contract brewery in Naperville, Illinois. Craftsmith makes beer for Noon Whistle, the nonalcoholic Go Brewing, and others. “Whether that’s in a PET package or aluminum cans, carbonation creates pressure that makes the package hold its shape. So, without it, you still need some rigidity to the container so that it travels well.”
Without CO2 inside, a can or other container risks collapsing in on itself, particularly when pallets are stacked atop each other. Combs says most aluminum-can manufacturers recommend CO2 levels no lower than 2.2 volumes in beverages meant for cans.
At the commercial level, breweries that want to produce truly still beverages also might consider a nitrogen doser, which essentially fills the can’s head space with nitrogen to help it maintain pressure. However, nitrogen dosers can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and—if not used correctly—they have the potential to drip and freeze up canning line conveyors. (Nitrogen also represents a potential hazard, as leaks can displace oxygen in a confined space and cause asphyxiation or loss of consciousness. Breweries that use it should make sure they have safety sensors that detect nitrogen as well as CO2.)
Even in a sturdy keg, still or low-carbonated beverages require some special attention. Use too much CO2 to dispense them or leave them connected to the CO2 supply for long enough, and the liquid absorbs the gas, becoming fizzier. Pushing liquid out of the keg also pulls in more CO2, and the liquid will continue to absorb it.
“If we tapped a half-barrel of hard lemonade and kept it on tap for a week at 14.5 psi—which is what we need to dispense beer at elevation here in Colorado—it’s going to be pretty close to 2.6 volumes by the time it comes to the end of that week,” Combs says. “So, either pushing it with a nitrogen-and-CO2 blend or pushing with very low CO2 are really your only two options.”
Setting Drinker Expectations
Creating and packaging low- or no-carbonation liquids is a game of minutiae. As such, it can be easy to lose sight of the goal: to create a uniquely delicious beverage that drinkers love.
Because we’re conditioned to expect most draft beers—and most beverages from a can—to be highly effervescent, it’s important that low-carb or still drinks properly let the customer know what they’re about to taste.
Above all, it’s important to consider how far a drink is going to deviate from drinkers’ expectations. A hard tea, for example, might not need to call out its lack of carbonation because regular iced tea isn’t normally fizzy. However, a brand like Funny Water—which calls itself “spiked water” and might be mistaken for hard seltzer—does include a “no bubbles” callout on its cans.
For Jester King, that communication is explicit and implicit. Stuffings explains the natural carbonation via videos on social-media channels, and it’s also written on the brewery’s website. The idea is to help people understand the less-perceptible bubbles in lambic-inspired beers. Packaging those beers in large-format bottles also helps, he says, as people already mentally connect that packaging with still wine.
“From a presentation standpoint, you get your mind already in the context of wine and lambic, which just helps that message a little bit,” he says. “And how it pours into the glass, with less of a glug and more of a smooth splash, continues to create those mental parallels.”
The range of perspectives you can apply to low- and no-carbonation beverages is vast. From traditional, spontaneously fermented beers to wine-like hybrids or new-wave FMBs that evoke lemonade, carbonation is a versatile tool in the kit. Dialing it back from standard beer levels creates challenges—but it also opens up a creative world of smooth, soft, drinks that stand out from others on the shelf or draft tower.
“It’s a fun world to play in,” Combs says. “There are a lot of possibilities out there, and I’m just excited to see brewers fearlessly jump at this and see what they pull off.”
Fun Cider Fact
Commercial ciders carbonated above 0.39 grams of CO2 per 100 ml (or about 1.6 volumes) are taxed at a rate more than triple that of those with lower carbonation, so many cidermakers carbonate their ciders to just below that threshold. The American Cider Association has long advocated for legislation to lower the threshold for this so-called “Bubble Tax.”
