Expert: Keith Patton - 10/17/2007

Question
I am relatively new at the beer brewing process, but I have had reasonable success so far.  I carbonate by adding sugar at the bottling phase.  I am curious if i could substitute splenda at this stage and produce "light" beer.  I'm not sure if it would react in the same way creating the CO2.  Thoughts?

Answer
Elizabeth:

No.  Splenda is a chemical compound that mimics sugar on our taste buds.  It does not provide anything for the yeast to metabolize.  It would simply provide you a flat sweet tasting beer.  

Light beers are made by filtering out all the proteins in the beer along with the body and flavor, giving you a tastless watery concoction called lite beer.  They then have to add foam stabilizing agents to give what little head a lite beer can form for the short time it has a head.  Proteins are the head formers in beer so take them out and you get none.  Taking out he proteins leaves just water, hops and carbohydrates in the form of alcohol.
If you are brewing and really want a lite beer, try moving up to all grain and use all pilsner malt with a rice or corn adjunct. You can find online a free brew recipe calculator.  Enter in your recipe then subtract out a portion of your extract and adjust the amount of rice or corm to make up the difference and the body of your beer will be lighter.  That is how budweiser and miller do it in their all grain brews.

Keith