When you hear of a brewery whose early releases include a biscotti pastry stout, a hazy session IPA, an oat cream pale ale, and a West Coast pils, what do you assume about them straight away?
They play with a variety of modern styles. They like to make beers with big flavours. They’re not afraid to experiment.
Given all that, you probably don’t assume they produce non-alc beers. But in the case of Mash Gang Australia – the local wing of the UK-based operation of the same name – that's exactly what they do.
“It’s fun and exciting, and the essence of what craft beer is,” is how Trent Sheiles, Mr Mash Gang Australia, describes it.
“We’re experimenting all the time, and trying different hop combinations, and different grain bills, different adjuncts. Just doing what a Mountain Culture, or a One Drop, or Garage Project do. Just with no alcohol.”
Depending on how closely you watch the non-alc / NOLO beer scene, you might know Mash Gang from the non-alc brewing outfit's early days in the UK. Since starting out in 2020 with just $5,000, they’ve made a name for themselves around the world by contract brewing and collaborating their way to all kinds of boundary-pushing styles and flavours.
At the time of writing, there are 105 different beers in Mash Gang’s Untappd archive, from lagers and pale ales – some more traditional, others less so – to the vanilla chocolate stout with sour cherry they made with Amundsen and the Strawberry & Jalapeño Margarita Pickleback they made with Vault City.
Almost all of Mash Gang’s beers are limited releases, but when it comes to creative ideas, they’re not limited by much at all. To quote Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls: the limit does not exist.
With no brewery of their own, Mash Gang aren’t limited by where they can brew, either. Which is where Mash Gang Australia comes into the picture.
Mash Gang Australia runs sort of like a franchise, and sort of like an outpost. Trent – or Trenno, as he’s known – is the Aussie at the helm, contract brewing Mash Gang beers on our shores. He’s very much connected to the core team in the UK: he visited in 2022 for a collab brew with Boxcar, and they’re forever nattering away in a group chat. But the beers he makes are exclusively for the Australian market.
He's been working in the food and beverage industry for years, but as an electrical and automation technician, not a brewer. In fact, before he got started with Mash Gang, he’d never made beer before.
“I didn’t know how to brew at that point. Wasn’t even doing any homebrewing,” he tells The Crafty Pint. “I had zero idea of what to do.”
But, like Mash Gang’s founders, he brought a conviction that people who want to cut back on alcohol shouldn’t have to cut back on the experience of trying new beers.
“I find a lot of the other non-alc brands, they have their core range only, but not many of them do a seasonal, or a one-off,” Trent says, with this paucity of variety eventually leading him to connect with Mash Gang.
When the first COVID lockdown hit in 2020, he was working from home and had more free time up his sleeve due to the lack of a commute. As day-drinking started to sneak into his life, he turned to non-alc beers to help curb his alcohol consumption. But when he found there weren’t many crafty non-alcs available in Australia, and that the US and the UK offered more variety, his change in habit soon snowballed into a small business passion project.
“I decided to start up a beer subscription,” he says. “Just thought there’d be people similar to me.”
Inspired by AF Beer Club in the UK, Trent started AF Beer Squad: a subscription service that sent out a curated box of non-alc beers each month. While more Aussie options were hitting the market, he still needed to contact breweries overseas in order to fill out each box with a variety of beers. When he heard about a new company called Mash Gang starting up in the UK, he reached out on Instagram and got chatting with the founder, Jordan Childs.
“We just got along really well,” he says. “We had a lot in common – stuff we done as kids, sorta been into metal music and skateboarding and stuff like that. We had a lot of banter about childhood, then banter about benders and sharing war stories.”
Before long, Trent became a kind of small-scale distributor for Mash Gang in Australia, selling the beers from his website to a slowly growing list of devoted customers.
“I was getting two or three cases over at a time to begin with, and they wouldn’t last the day – they’d just fly.”
Since there looked to be a market, Jordan soon suggested they look into brewing in Australia. It was a steep learning curve for Trent as he navigated contract brewing, but with Jordan guiding him from the UK and the brewers at Big Shed lending their expertise, at the end of 2021 Mash Gang’s first Aussie-brewed beer was ready to roll: Yeah Nah Yeah, a “West Coast hazy.”
Shrinking To Grow
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. After brewing a fruited sour for their next beer, he discovered the batches they were making were too large for the Aussie market, and he found himself with more beer than he could sell.
“In hindsight, probably not the best beer to release,” he admits. “It was still new to the space, and sours are very unique and very niche as they are. Make it a non-alc and it makes it harder to sell again.
“Some hard lessons learned from there.”
The next year saw Mash Gang Australia faltering as they struggled to find a brewery that offered contract brewing in small enough batches – even importing beers from the UK was becoming harder as the cost of shipping soared. At the same time, Mash Gang launched in the US, which consumed much of the core team in the UK's focus.
As a result, there was a period during which Trent felt like he was just “twiddling his thumbs”, waiting for something to change. Then that something dropped into his lap: Nick Calder-Scholes from One Drop contacted him, asking if he wanted to collaborate on a beer.
It was a bit of a fanboy moment, an admirer of everything One Drop is about. As he said on the Mash Gang Australia Instagram: “If you’re knocking out big stupid beers with glitter in them and tons of adjuncts, yes I wanna party with you homie.”
When Trent and Nick – two people who will never be accused of clinging to the Reinheitsgebot – got together, the beer they made was never going to be tame. Thus, in mid-2023, they made Gang Gang Biscotti Pastry Stout, which caught the attention of plenty of punters and, ultimately, greased the wheels of Mash Gang Australia.
“Once the One Drop collab came through, that sparked us up again,” Trent says.
A few months later, they followed up with another collab – an oat cream pale ale called Regulate – and its success led to an ongoing contract brewing partnership. Now Trent puts down a new thousand-litre batch at One Drop every few months, and it sells in good time.
“Ten hectolitre is our magic number at the moment,” he says.
For each recipe, he experiments first at home; once he makes a beer he’s happy with just below mid-strength, he knows he’s onto something.
“I find if I can brew a three percent beer, I can match it at non-alc just by adjusting the grain bill and what adjuncts we use.
“I write the [commercial] recipe about two weeks before, and get Nick at One Drop to cast his eyes over it, give me a thumbs up or thumbs down, or rework it where he thinks I can rework some things.”
When it comes time to make the beer, Trent flies down from Brisbane to participate in the brew day. After that, he leaves it in Nick’s capable hands to take the beer to final product, including whatever dry-hopping and adjuncts need to happen between brew day and packaging.
“He’s very, very good at high risk beers,” Trent says. “He’s probably made 5,000 beers! They drop four a week. It’s ridiculous.
“I wouldn’t want anyone else making our beers for us. That attention to detail … He’s a magician.”
Nick’s expertise and experience are certainly a huge part of why Mash Gang Australia’s beers turn out so well. But it would be foolish to overlook what the operation's local guide brings to the table. Because, when it comes to making non-alcs, brewers who are used to making alcoholic beers can find it hard to think outside of normal processes. Trent, on the other hand, didn’t come to Mash Gang from a brewing background.
“I probably didn’t learn to brew beer – I learned to brew non-alc beer. Things you probably wouldn’t do traditionally, I did because I didn’t know any different.”
When it comes to building particular flavour profiles or solving problems in a non-alc brew, he brings out-of-the-box ideas as well as tried-and-tested methods he's learned from Jordan and the crew (who also came from non-brewing backgrounds before Mash Gang) – methods that can surprise more experienced brewers.
“Nick’s sort of like, ‘You’re the boss – I’ll do what you want,’ but some of the other brewers I spoke to that work at One Drop, it sort of blows their mind, because it’s different to what you usually do,” Trent says.
“It may sound silly, but it’s a different product, and you can’t treat it the same.”
The Mash Gang Method
Mash Gang have built their reputation with non-alc beers that exceed expectations and impress drinkers. So what’s the secret?
Making the beer non-alc is the easy part: they create a wort with minimal fermentable sugar using a low grain bill and high mash temperature. But it’s easy for such an approach to result in a beer that’s insipid or uninspiring. The difficulty is in making that beer appealing.
Trent says it’s not enough to simply tweak standard beer recipes; it’s about building the colour, mouthfeel and flavour of each beer from the ground up.
“You’re not brewing a beer, you’re designing a beer,” he says.
Drinkers expect beer to look and feel and taste a certain way, but many of those elements come about as a direct result of standard brewing methods. Change the mash bill, change the fermentation profile, take alcohol out of the equation, and suddenly you have to address each of those elements in a different way.
“There’s a lot of things you take for granted when you’re brewing normal beer,” Trent says.
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One example he gives is the amount of sugars involved in brewing a standard beer. When you brew a non-alcoholic beer, the gravity – which indicates the amount of sugars in a beer – is generally very low, which results in a thin and watery mouthfeel. One way he addresses this is by adding non-fermentable sugars like lactose and maltodextrin; the downside here is that you end up with a beer that’s very sweet.
“You need to get some other sugars in there to increase the body. Then you can hop additions as well for the bitterness, so you can really balance it out that way,” he explains.
“It’s a balancing act, trying to figure out all of that. There’s science behind the liquid.”
The wider Mash Gang team have found all manner of ways to bring the colour and mouthfeel of their non-alcs more in line with a normal beer. This often involves using traditional ingredients in ways that may seem out of place to a traditional brewer, such as playing around with the water profile in uncommon ways or including a small amount of roasted barley where you wouldn't normally expect it.
“We’ve done a lot of experimentation; we’ve probably produced 200 beers in the UK and the US, so that’s a lot of data we’re running off.”
While they have a variety of go-to methods they'll mix and match depending on the kind of beer they’re making, they still find new ways of doing things all the time.
Take Regulate Oat Cream Pale Ale, for example. To attain the body they were after, they used 250kg of oats in a 10hL batch – around triple the amount you’d expect in an oat cream pale. And, rather than simply add the oats to the mash, they soaked them overnight to make a true oat cream base, then transferred that to the kettle before mashing in with the rest of the grain bill.
“That gave it a really velvet, creamy mouthfeel,” Trent says. “Quite luxurious. Quite a unique beer.”
Part of “designing a beer” the Mash Gang way is about liberal use of adjuncts too. For some beer styles, that means looking to novelty adjuncts to create novelty flavours, as with the biscotti pastry stout. But even in more “normal” styles, they looks to a pool of ingredients well beyond malt and hops as they aim to hit each part of the desired flavour profile.
“[Alcohol] makes hops taste differently, or the grains taste differently, so you have to find ways to replicate that.”
Sometimes that means using a fruit adjunct to replicate certain hop flavours. And sometimes it means finding more creative ways to achieve a particular flavour.
Just look at his recent West Coast pils, Parallels. It contains an addition of candied grapefruit to complement the hops. It has a bit of chilli in the mash, not to add spice but to offset the sweetness that can come with non-alcs (a little Mash Gang trick). And there's another ingredient you wouldn’t normally select for such a beer: Manuka smoked malt.
“It was only a kilo in a ten-hec batch – a very tiny touch – but it just amplifies and gives a lot more depth in a beer. I find it increases the dank level of those west coast hops,” he says.
“It doesn’t taste smoky at all. It just tastes dank.”
It can be hard to imagine how smoked malt can be used in a hoppy beer – especially “a really crispy, crushable beer” – to amp up the hoppiness. But for Trent that’s part of the game.
“It was a bit of a hunch, and it worked out well,” he says. “Forever experimenting.”
For now, Mash Gang Australia remains a fairly small operation. Trent can’t pour as much time into the business as he’d like given he works another full-time job. And, understandably, the core team is focused mostly on the larger UK and US markets. But he continues to hold the fort, doing what he can to get Mash Gang beers into the hands of people thirsty for bold beers without the alcohol.
“There’s definitely an appetite there,” he says. “It’s just getting them out to the masses. I’ve got no marketing budget. Just me making stupid Instagram videos.”
For all that, he isn’t slowing down. With Parallels now out across Australia, he’s figuring out the next recipe: a Cali IPA.
Who knows what that recipe will end up including. Pine needles and pineapple chunks? Terpenes and tropical bubblegum? Orange sherbet and oak staves?
Wherever he lands you can be sure of one thing: it won't be boring.
Mash Gang Australia is offering Crafty Pint readers a 10 percent discount for Dry July – visit the Mash Gang Australia website and enter the code CraftyPint10.
Currently, Parallels WC Pils is the only Aussie-brewed beer in stock on the site, although a few other online retailers still have stock of Beach Goon Super Session IPA. But, as luck would have it, a pallet of Mash Gang beers from the UK landed just as this article was taking shape.
Check out this article to hear from some other breweries about how they make non-alc beers, including Craig Basford talking about the Mash Gang x Big Shed HellWeisse Passionfruit Mango Sour.
Parallels artwork by tattoo artist @melancholic_mami
Photo at top by @pixelaboutyou
Mick Wüst is the author of the book Beer Drinker's Toolkit, a fun and approachable guide to beer. He's also a freelance copywriter for the beer industry. You can find him on Instagram as Schoonerversity.
The beer(s) or moment(s) that turned you on to good beer:
I'm sure I'd had good beers before this, but the first barrel-aged imperial stout I ever tried made me feel like Popeye with spinach.
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Balter XPA
- Wayward Raspberry Berliner Weisse
- Boatrocker Ramjet
The last beer you enjoyed:
A IIPA from Woopi Brewing that tasted like fruit salad and resin.
Three things that represent you:
- Book - World War Z (seriously, give it a go - it's better than it sounds)
- Travel - Greece
- Food - all the bread and hot chips
