Big Ditch Hayburner without the alcohol? Say hello to NA Burner

Buffalo brewery becomes the one of the first in this region to release a non-alcoholic beer. And hopefully it won't be the last.

It can be argued that Big Ditch Hayburner is western New York’s IPA. Sales figures and ubiquity certainly prove this out. (Hayburner is the official Buffalo Bills beverage of the Cleveland household.)

At 7.2 percent alcohol, Big Ditch’s flagship American IPA packs a punch just like its namesake mules that molded the Erie Canal 200 year ago. But you don’t always want a beer to kick your ass. Sometimes you just want something hoppy and satisfying (or maybe you’re abstaining from alcohol for any number of reasons) without the ass-kicking.

After more than two years in planning, Big Ditch is unveiling NA Burner (pronounced “ennnnn ayyyy burner”), the latest member of its Hayburner family and the first non-alcoholic beer from the city of Buffalo in nearly 100 years. Big Ditch brass consulted with the Buffalo History Museum and determined no one has made an NA beer in the city since prior to Prohibition. (And that’s why I like that crew so much — they’re my kind of nerds.) It’ll be available at the brewery taproom, 55 E. Huron St., before seeing distribution in the near future at all of your favorite craft beer retailers.

When I talked to Big Ditch co-founder and president Matt Kahn Thursday night, he joked about all the different times you could potentially enjoy an NA Burner. What’s to stop you from making a beer-mosa with it or enjoying a refreshing can at lunch? At less than 0.5 percent alcohol, it’s unquestionably a versatile beverage.

“You could have one for breakfast, technically,” Kahn joked. “It has less calories than the yogurt I eat in the morning (NA Burner clocks in with 50 calories).”

Kahn is exceedingly proud of the Big Ditch team with this latest release. From the amount of research they put in, to the regulatory hurdles they jumped over, it wasn’t easy to get to this point.

“A lot of them are pretty light-bodied,” Kahn said. “Ours is light-bodied, too. It’s an NA beer. It should be refreshing. But we wanted to keep it tasting like a beer. We know it’s important for folks who drink NA beers. They want a beer-like experience. Hopefully we achieved that.” (Editorial aside: Yes, they achieved that. More on my thoughts below.)

He continued (when Kahn talks, you listen, because he always has great, reasoned perspective and insight), “We know there’s growing consumer interest in non-alcoholic beverages, in particular, full-flavored non-alcohol beverages. We’ve seen it in our taproom.”

Kahn said when the Big Ditch taproom opened in mid-2015, it didn’t offer any NA options or craft cocktails. Since then, it has added a non-alcoholic beer (usually something from Brooklyn Brewing) and a mocktail, which has become the second best-selling cocktail in the taproom.

The food safety aspect (meeting FDA guidelines after testing) took an inordinate amount of time to research. Kahn and brewery co-founder Corey Catalano worked in the biotech/pharmaceutical industry and had some familiarity with FDA approvals. That helped. But it was one of the two biggest challenges when crafting the beer. Flavor, obviously, was the second challenge.

“We had to unlearn and re-learn how to make beer in order to make this beer,” Kahn said. “It’s completely different. It’s something similar, but a lot of things are different.”

Unlike a lot of breweries with NA beers in their portfolios, Big Ditch ultimately decided to make NA Burner in-house. A lot of breweries utilize contract partners to produce these beers since it often involves acquiring specialized equipment to successfully make them.

Kahn declined to reveal any specifics about Big Ditch’s process, but said, “We investigated all sorts of different ways to do this.”

My verdict

No bullshit (or mule shit?!), NA Burner is very, very good. It drinks like the brewery’s Dayburner session IPA. It has roughly the same amount of body as that session IPA and doesn’t finish empty or watery like many non-alcoholic beers do. (To get a little nerdy, it’s hard to attain a lot of body on many of these offerings if you’re not using a vacuum distillation process to remove the alcohol. And you won’t see most small craft breweries utilizing that process because it’s stupidly expensive. You’ll see vacuum distilling used by the big guys. That’s probably why NA Guinness, a true 0.0 percent alcohol beer, has so much body and so closely mirrors regular Guinness.)

If you’re looking for this NA to approximate Hayburner, you won’t find it here (or anywhere). It doesn’t have the same amount of malt character. But it does have a refreshing and quenching and bright lemony hoppiness with a touch of that dank characteristic you will find in Hayburner.

Truthfully, the beer is very impressive and opens up a world of possibilities for Big Ditch. This moves the brewery beyond being a brewery and makes it more into a beverage company. Therefore, it wouldn’t shock me to see Big Ditch explore other beverage categories. (This could just be me projecting. But if you consider the amount of work Big Ditch put into developing this NA offering, you don’t have to do a crazy amount of mental gymnastics to see them exploring other areas.)

I hope this kick-starts a trend in WNY. I hope we see other breweries release non-alcoholic offerings (outside of big guys like Genesee, Southern Tier, Other Half — which has made a draft-only NA IPA — and Bud). And again, this could be wishful thinking, because I know the process can be arduous — from gaining regulatory approval from the FDA (though we could see the FDA eliminated if RFK Jr. has his way, woof) to ironing out the kinks of a very different type of brewing process. Who knows. But this release is wildly cool nonetheless and I hope it’s a smashing success.

A final note: It’s pretty wild to think I’ve been working on this independent publication for over two years now. In that time, I’ve published 200 newsletters, highlighted some of my favorite people in the industry, curated two beers festivals (that featured 150 participants and 4,600 attendees), and continued to break all the biggest news in the region (closures, consolidations, openings, etc.).

The Cleveland Prost remains the preeminent source for regional beer news. If you own a brewery, bar, or beer-adjacent business, this is the best place to reach the nerds you wanna be in front of. So I remain open to sponsorships, advertisements, and sponsored content. Feel free to reach out to me at clevelandprost@gmail.com for more. And more than anything, thanks for all the support. None of this would be possible without the devoted (and thirsty) audience.