Joseph Owades

Joseph Lawrence Owades (July 9, 1919 – December 16, 2005) was an American biochemist and brewer of light and industrially produced beer. He adjusted analytical techniques and quality control, developing the first light beer and the process for making it, creating many new, unique, and successful specialty beers. He is regarded as the father of light beer.

Owades was born in Manhattan, the son of Jewish parents, and raised in the Bronx. His father was a dressmaker. In 1939 he graduated from City College of New York (undergraduate), followed by Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (Master’s and PhD in biochemistry (1944, 1950), with a dissertation on cholesterol titled Sterol Sulphates: A Study of αCholesterylene and Other Decomposition Products. After wartime work for the US Navy, he went on to Fleischmann's Yeast, Schwarz Laboratories in Mount Venon, New York (where he taught the Schwarz Brewing Course), and Rheingold Breweries in Brooklyn, where he became Vice President–Technical Director.

His ideas on the nature of yeast metabolism and the starches found in malt led Owades to search for an enzyme that could break the side-branching chains of starch, which could allow yeast to digest all of the starch and produce a beer with no residual carbohydrates and lower calories. In 1967 Rheingold introduced the first "light beer", Gablinger’s Diet Beer, using this enzyme. It flopped, but its many successors, starting with Miller Lite became successful in the American beer marketplace.

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