Yeast immobilization: magic beans of fermentation

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Well, there are other things coming into place when the Starsan contacts beer/wort. There is some left on surfaces but it will quickly be diluted also. Kind of like I don't worry about cooling down my priming sugar solution that much anymore. By the time I pour it into my bottling bucket and get a few quarts of beer onto it I've killed a few yeast but not too many.
 
I just finished making yeast beads with 34/70 dry lager yeast. I made a double batch with two packets. I punched holes in a disposable plastic container and let it slowly drip into the calci water til it was gone. I'm going to try it in a low gravity lager and see what happens.
 
Let us know how it goes slickfish.

I would like to see this process in a grain to glass contest. Would pitching yeast then switching to recirculating under pressure after 3 days give us beer in half the time it does now? Maybe the next brew day I can try this with one batch.
 
Here's a pic of the lager beads.

image-3465617123.jpg
 
Here's a pic of the lager beads.

Interesting, yours sink while the original poster's sank. Maybe it is just handling or the densities involved, but maybe it does have something to do with lager vs. ale yeast?

I really would like ot hear how yours turns out since it may make brewing a cleaner lager a little easier.
 
Interesting, yours sink while the original poster's sank. Maybe it is just handling or the densities involved, but maybe it does have something to do with lager vs. ale yeast?

I really would like ot hear how yours turns out since it may make brewing a cleaner lager a little easier.

Mine actually mostly sank initially, but then started floating during fermentation. Once fermentation ended, they sank again.

A small proportion got air bubbles stuck in them, which left them floating.
 
Would it be permeable? A small test in some sugar water might give at least a hint. More complex sugars might require a further test if that works.

As I pointed out earlier in the thread, at least one study has described chitosan actually being used to make the beads MORE permeable/increasing pore size.
 
As I pointed out earlier in the thread, at least one study has described chitosan actually being used to make the beads MORE permeable/increasing pore size.
I thought that was mixing it in, not coating the beads. I don't see how a coating would be the same thing. But, best way to find out is to try it.
 
I thought that was mixing it in, not coating the beads. I don't see how a coating would be the same thing. But, best way to find out is to try it.

Ah, I gotcha. I'm not quite sure on how differently it would function. Experimentation is indeed probably the best answer, but at first glance it seems to me to be the kind of thing that would require more sophisticated tools than the average brewer has, to properly validate any findings - the apparent "shedding" of yeast cells could actually be due to a number of different reasons.
 
Here's a pic of the lager beads.

Looks like a breakfast cereal. They're kid tested...mother approved.

Speaking of which, my wife recently bought some organic, gluten-free, snooty version of Kix called "Gorilla Munch" but my two year old son calls "Monkey Balls". I haven't had the heart to correct him.

On a serious note, you guys rock.
 
Yet, I've never heard of a commercial brewery actually going this route. I've got to imagine that if AB-Inbev isn't doing this, it's not because they haven't heard of it.

I've only read through the first 8 pages of this thread so far so I apologize if this has already been covered but the huge British ale company, Marstons is using this technology commercially currently. The pubs really love it. They use it for what may be it's ideal practical brewery application: cask ale.

The downsides of the technology seem to be fermentation performance; but that's not such a big deal when your secondary fermentation is occurring out of your expensive clyndro conicals and in casks on the way to pubs. Pubs hate the beer losses and excess yeast that often end up in cask ale, but people like that the beer is still "living" and the yeast are still conditioning the beer and producing CO2; these yeast balls solve the problem as the beer is both clear and alive and producing CO2.

See www.fastcask.com for Marston's page on their application of the tech.

This is a great technology to use for secondary conditioning even for homebrewers. We can crash cool after primary fermentation is complete and then transfer the clear beer into a corney keg for cold or warm conditioning with yeast. I think it could also be great for lagering in a keg that you're already serving from especially if the yeast balls are added to a stainless tea strainer as someone already mentioned. I LOVE that FANTASTIC well-conditioned flavor that you get from a really long slow lagered lager, or a kellerbier after the yeast finally drops but I don't want to keep transferring off of the yeast or sucking up yeast in my keg dip tube.

This is a great technology for all secondary fermentation, IMHO. People HATE that home brew often has a bunch of yeast in the bottle; if you add 3 yeast balls to each beer when bottling you can easily leave them behind in the bottle and get out 98% of the nice clear beer.

We know that there's no oxygen scavenging technology that works better than live yeast.


Adam
 
people like that the beer is still "living" and the yeast are still conditioning the beer and producing CO2; these yeast balls solve the problem as the beer is both clear and alive and producing CO2.

THIS is really cool!!!
 
speaking of diffusion of sugars...

This sounds like it would be more efficient with simple sugars since the permeability of longer chain sugars would be naturally smaller.
I wonder if the wine guys are "lining up" to try this... :D

Good call.

More evidence that this technology is ideal for bottle / keg / cask conditioning. (If you've added a bit of simple sugar for carbonation.)


Adam
 
Another possibility is that the alpha acids are the same between the two beers, but the absence of flocculating yeast in the beads beer resulted in less hop polyphenols falling out of suspension and the increased in perceived bitterness is not alpha acid related. Perhaps a fining of a sample of the beads beer would provide a means of testing that hypothesis?

EXACTLY what I was going to suggest.
This is a great guess.


Adam
 
I've only read through the first 8 pages of this thread so far so I apologize if this has already been covered but the huge British ale company, Marstons is using this technology commercially currently. The pubs really love it. They use it for what may be it's ideal practical brewery application: cask ale.

The downsides of the technology seem to be fermentation performance; but that's not such a big deal when your secondary fermentation is occurring out of your expensive clyndro conicals and in casks on the way to pubs. Pubs hate the beer losses and excess yeast that often end up in cask ale, but people like that the beer is still "living" and the yeast are still conditioning the beer and producing CO2; these yeast balls solve the problem as the beer is both clear and alive and producing CO2.

See www.fastcask.com for Marston's page on their application of the tech.

This is a great technology to use for secondary conditioning even for homebrewers. We can crash cool after primary fermentation is complete and then transfer the clear beer into a corney keg for cold or warm conditioning with yeast. I think it could also be great for lagering in a keg that you're already serving from especially if the yeast balls are added to a stainless tea strainer as someone already mentioned. I LOVE that FANTASTIC well-conditioned flavor that you get from a really long slow lagered lager, or a kellerbier after the yeast finally drops but I don't want to keep transferring off of the yeast or sucking up yeast in my keg dip tube.

This is a great technology for all secondary fermentation, IMHO. People HATE that home brew often has a bunch of yeast in the bottle; if you add 3 yeast balls to each beer when bottling you can easily leave them behind in the bottle and get out 98% of the nice clear beer.

We know that there's no oxygen scavenging technology that works better than live yeast.


Adam


It's also ideal for secondary fermentation / conditioning as you have full "normal beer" ester levels by doing a normal fermentation in primary and then you're using the ultra clean fermenting beads for conditioning.

Its incredibly common to use a separate strain for conditioning in cask and in bottle and the beads could definitely be a separate strain as you've already transferred off of your primary yeast at that point in time and you can repitch your single strain primary yeast to the next batch without any worry about "free range" yeasts escaping from the beads.


I believe someone else mentioned that because the yeast isn't reproducing that you don't need to worry about mutations either. Bottle conditioning really strong Belgians is always a challenge; why not add a couple fresh yeast beads made from a highly alcohol tolerant and neutral strain to each 750ml bottle to give you the best chance of successfully carbonating that 10%+ Belgian Quad.


I'd love to see the technology applied to a craft beer bottling line where a couple of beads are automatically added to a bottle.


Adam
 
Its incredibly common to use a separate strain for conditioning in cask and in bottle and the beads could definitely be a separate strain as you've already transferred off of your primary yeast at that point in time and you can repitch your single strain primary yeast to the next batch without any worry about "free range" yeasts escaping from the beads.

Seems like you'd need to filter or centrifuge the primary yeast out to really take advantage of this...
 
Sinebrychoff (owned by Carslberg) also developed and uses yeast immobilization technique in commercial scale here in Finland.

They use it only for lagering atm, and with this method it takes only 2 hours. I have drink many times Koff lager and although some people say the can definitely taste difference in beer lagered with this "immo" technique vs normal beer, I can not, it tastes exactly like average tasteless bulk lager sold everywhere.

http://www.geap-india.com/gpin/cmsresources.nsf/filenames/Immocon-rapid%20maturation%20of%20beer.pdf/$file/Immocon-rapid%20maturation%20of%20beer.pdf
 
Ok, let me get this right. I will admit that I haven't read every post in this thread. But, when a HBT member does something cool like these yeast beads, it is awesome and everyone is on board, but when some other guys do it, they get trashed in their thread. I hope everyone reads this thread and then goes and reads the Mupor thread. WAAAAYYYY different tone from the community.

Just sayin


Cool idea though. Can't wait to see more results.
 
Ok, let me get this right. I will admit that I haven't read every post in this thread. But, when a HBT member does something cool like these yeast beads, it is awesome and everyone is on board, but when some other guys do it, they get trashed in their thread. I hope everyone reads this thread and then goes and reads the Mupor thread. WAAAAYYYY different tone from the community.

Just sayin


Cool idea though. Can't wait to see more results.

Some truth to that, but if you look you'll see that there were very few comments from Mupor and almost no technical information. So, that created frustration that was multiplied when they began asking for money. I'm not excusing what happened, but it's a different situation in this thread.

Let's not rehash that previous thread again. This is Malfet's thread, he's been very open and technical, and he hasn't asked for money yet :D
 
Ok, let me get this right. I will admit that I haven't read every post in this thread. But, when a HBT member does something cool like these yeast beads, it is awesome and everyone is on board, but when some other guys do it, they get trashed in their thread. I hope everyone reads this thread and then goes and reads the Mupor thread. WAAAAYYYY different tone from the community.

Just sayin

There's a big difference between a thread whose message is basically "hey guys, check out this cool experiment I'm doing, and here's how I did it" and "hey guys, we'd love to have some of you test out this magical stuff we're doing, but won't tell you more than a few self-contradictory details. Whoops! We'd actually like to get paid for this testing, check out our kickstarter."

Big difference. Yes, things got out of hand in the Mupor thread, but you're also not comparing apples to apples.

-Rich
 
Some truth to that, but if you look you'll see that there were very few comments from Mupor and almost no technical information. So, that created frustration that was multiplied when they began asking for money. I'm not excusing what happened, but it's a different situation in this thread.

Let's not rehash that previous thread again. This is Malfet's thread, he's been very open and technical, and he hasn't asked for money yet :D

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it'll last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money. [Mark Twain]
 
Ok, let me get this right. I will admit that I haven't read every post in this thread. But, when a HBT member does something cool like these yeast beads, it is awesome and everyone is on board, but when some other guys do it, they get trashed in their thread. I hope everyone reads this thread and then goes and reads the Mupor thread. WAAAAYYYY different tone from the community.

Just to reiterate what I said in the Mupor thread, I know absolutely nothing about their process and likewise I have absolutely no reason to believe that they and I are doing the same thing.

This thread should neither confirm nor deny any of their claims.
 
Pretty cool. And I haven't had the time to read every post (yet) but I had some comments. The primary problem with this method is poor surface area of yeast, creating slow mass transfer gradients. One of my former chem eng profs actually developed the immobilization patent for labbats brewery. You can google his patent I believe (Ronald Neufeld). You need some sort of agitation around the beads. I believe his system worked by cycling the flow of the wort through a plug flow reactor stuffed with the yeast beads.

The main advantage he pointed out was not faster clearing or flavour profiles, but primarily speed and turnover time. Using immobilized yeast they do not have to run a batch process with lag times, set up times and cleanup... They just have to continuously run wort through the reactor. Would be pretty cool to have a continuos supply of you house ipa dripping into a keg all day.
 
I read through the whole thread and maybe I missed it. How did you maintain sanitation while making the beads? And you mentioned cleaning it with an acid wash via a concentrated star san solution. What was your process for this?
 
MachineShopBrewing said:
I read through the whole thread and maybe I missed it. How did you maintain sanitation while making the beads? And you mentioned cleaning it with an acid wash via a concentrated star san solution. What was your process for this?

I just used sanitary utensils and vessels throughout the process. Nothing fancy.

As far as acid washing goes, there are threads that go into plenty of detail, but I just mixed up some starsan and soaked the beads for 15 minutes. I didn't write down the concentration I used, but I calculated it from a standard acid washing protocol.
 
What about pumping the wort through the beads? Something akin to recirculating while mashing or kind of like a aquarium filter. Not sure about what to hold the beads in. PVC pipe comes to mind but I know that isn't food safe. Hmmmm. Very interesting thread MalFet.
 
Doesn't BrewersHardware sell triclamp spool pieces?

A section of that with some triclamp screen gaskets would work with two hose barbs of you choice.
 
The crazy shapes sound fun, but to be honest I don't think it's a practical road to go down. Anything other than a sphere will require a significantly more complicated production process. Any diameter of "snake" will be significantly harder to produce than beads of the same diameter, and the beads will have a better overall surface area for the given volume.

In general, I think you want the beads to be as small as is practical. Mine are quite small, maybe a quarter the total volume of a green pea each. If I were to find myself restricted by this size, I would probably just make more of them rather than figure out how to make them smaller.

A) this thread is awesome -- only on page 9 and already have so much i want to comment on, but:

B) the reason for spheres is also that they are a good shape for packing efficiently. One consideration might be to have an enclosed system with a small packed column of immobilized yeasties and a recirc pump. Since a fine mesh will hold the calcium alginate beads in place, the fluid can pass through the packed bed column.

Another thought -- if your beads are small enough you can fit a few thousand inside of silicone tubing, then continuously cycle your wort through that.
 
Norselord said:
A) this thread is awesome -- only on page 9 and already have so much i want to comment on, but:

B) the reason for spheres is also that they are a good shape for packing efficiently. One consideration might be to have an enclosed system with a small packed column of immobilized yeasties and a recirc pump. Since a fine mesh will hold the calcium alginate beads in place, the fluid can pass through the packed bed column.

Another thought -- if your beads are small enough you can fit a few thousand inside of silicone tubing, then continuously cycle your wort through that.

Awesome. Keep the comments coming! I'm mostly just flying by the seat of my pants here, so I'm always interested in those with actual experience.

Personally, if it works, I like the idea of reusable tube runs/canisters of yeast. It sounds tremendously convenient.
 
Best thread I've read in a while! MalFet, I doff my cap.

The Marston's fastcask EPA is actually pretty good - it tastes decent, and being able to tap it as soon as it was in position is pretty useful (I worked in a pub for a while). This is easier than what you normally have to do with cask ales, which is leave it to settle for 24 hours before tapping. Although it's only a problem if you're disorganised, since most pub cellars are st up to allow you to have a few of kegs settling while serving from others. Might help places with small cellars to serve cask ales, which is always good.

They just need to start making more types of beer that way!
 
Consider the attached diagram

1) Fermenter with two hose barb attachment and airlock
2) peristaltic pump sized to provide calculated flow and pressure to 3-5
3) column with alpha amylase beads
4) column with beta galactosidase
5) column with yeast beads

-- column dimensions based on contact time, reaction rate, ability of beads to withstand flow stresses

Optional inline columns: filtering, nutrient, dry hop column, or maybe even a UV disinfection column.

Thought experiment -- if a combination of flow and column dimensions allow for a single pass, is it possible to produce a continuous flow of beer at the end of the process. This may require maintaining a volume in the 1st tank between a certain minimum/maximum level through periodic additions of fresh wort. Potential advantages to continuously brewed beer are the reduction or process down-time and cost of sanitation, a consistency of beer over a long period of time...

Just spit balling here...

Beer.JPG
 
Norselord said:
Consider the attached diagram

1) Fermenter with two hose barb attachment and airlock
2) peristaltic pump sized to provide calculated flow and pressure to 3-5
3) column with alpha amylase beads
4) column with beta galactosidase
5) column with yeast beads

-- column dimensions based on contact time, reaction rate, ability of beads to withstand flow stresses

Optional inline columns: filtering, nutrient, dry hop column, or maybe even a UV disinfection column.

Thought experiment -- if a combination of flow and column dimensions allow for a single pass, is it possible to produce a continuous flow of beer at the end of the process. This may require maintaining a volume in the 1st tank between a certain minimum/maximum level through periodic additions of fresh wort. Potential advantages to continuously brewed beer are the reduction or process down-time and cost of sanitation, a consistency of beer over a long period of time...

Just spit balling here...

I like where you're going with this, but I do wonder, where is the new starch being introduced? You've eliminated the need to mash with the columns, but you still need an efficient way to get starch out of the malt.
 
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