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Philip Friedman

If you've ever tasted a Miller Lite, you know it takes a lot of water to make beer. That water is heavy—8 pounds per gallon. Which means that there's a huge monetary and environmental expense in transporting and distributing kegs and cases around the world. But in 2008 Pat Tatera of Pat's Backcountry Beverages in Golden, Colorado, came up with a solution: Add the water after you ship the beer.

Previous efforts to concentrate beer have involved removing water from full-fledged brews, taking away much of the beer's flavor in the process. Tatera, a chemical engineer and home brewer, came at it a different way. He devised a process he calls nested fermentation, whereby a beer is brewed in the largest amount of malt and with the least amount of water that the yeast can survive in and still effectively ferment. That beer is vacuum-distilled, which means the air pressure is removed and the alcohol from the brew is evaporated, extracted, and set aside for later. Left behind is a thick, nonalcoholic beer that gets brewed with a new batch of malt and yeast to make another, highly alcoholic, beer. The process is repeated several times before the syrup and the alcohol removed in each batch are combined to create a fluid that's 58 percent alcohol by volume per 50-milliliter packet. And looks like motor oil. There are three ways to turn the syrup into a real beer. You can add a packet of the company's 1919 Pale Rail ale or Black Hops IPA-style concentrate to a pint glass of cold soda water, or run it through a home soda maker. Or you can take it on the go and mix still water and the concentrate in Tatera's patented carbonator—basically a SodaStream in a Nalgene bottle. When reconstituted, you've got a craft beer that can stand up to traditional brews. Really.

The company is introducing yet another way to dilute its syrup with the release of a reconstituting tap later this year, meaning that beer from concentrate could be on draft at the bar right next to traditionally made brews. It'll be the most flavorful watered-down beer you'll ever order.

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The Taste Test

By Dave Arnold, bartender and author of Liquid Intelligence (Norton, $35)

"Conceptually, kudos to these guys for pulling off such a crazy idea. My bartenders could make an interesting cocktail using the syrup as bitters. You get a nice head on the beers when you stir them up in the glass. The Pail Rail tastes like a beer. It's definitely not the worst I've ever had. Sort of like Yuengling. That is the better of the two. They hopped the hell out of the Black Hops. It was hard for me to taste it. It's over-caramelized, with a candied flavor at the end."