Pasteurize homebrew?

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Trizzle

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How does one pasteurize homebrew? This doesn't effect flavor has anyone done it?
 
You can't boil beer to pasteurize it; once you hit 78C you'll boil off all the ethanol!

Lookup the "low temp, long time" pasteurization method -I used it in an 1850 historical london porter after aging 1/3 of the batch on a lambic blend for a year, pasteurizing this batch and then blending with a larger batch of "fresh" london porter. I didn't want the Brett to continue working after blending and bottling as it would change the flavor profile and create bottle bombs. -It worked a treat!


Adam
 
So u don't pasteurize beer I guess. Even commercially. They actually filter the crap out of it! They force it through screens and filters. There's actually a website that sells them for home brewers! You would have to keg it to carbonate but especially if u brew for competition, for 100$ that's pretty good!
 
So u don't pasteurize beer I guess. Even commercially. They actually filter the crap out of it! They force it through screens and filters. There's actually a website that sells them for home brewers! You would have to keg it to carbonate but especially if u brew for competition, for 100$ that's pretty good!

Beer is pasteurized commercially. I tried a Guinness Draught the other day, and it said right on the bottle it was pasteurized. http://www.gigfy.com/faqs.html
 
I have heard of a some what dangerous method..not sure if it works but if you attempt wear goggles and gloves...It involves taking your finished beer in bottles and heating water to 140*F and putting your bottles in the water and holding the temp for 15-20 mins and allowing to cool naturally..Can cause bottles to explode so be careful..cheers
 
I have heard of a some what dangerous method..not sure if it works but if you attempt wear goggles and gloves...It involves taking your finished beer in bottles and heating water to 140*F and putting your bottles in the water and holding the temp for 15-20 mins and allowing to cool naturally..Can cause bottles to explode so be careful..cheers

Close. That's how it is described in my link. You heat the water to 190*F, then put the bottles in. If you put the bottles in first, it will create air pockets under the bottles and cause them to blow up or something. I did it with my cider and it worked well, but we did have a couple tops blow off, and one bottle explode. I had my SS top on my kettle though, so no harm, no foul. The bottles that had issues were all Anchor Steam bottles, which I had heard of people having various issues with before, so they may have just not been well capped. I will be doing it again.
 
Close. That's how it is described in my link. You heat the water to 190*F, then put the bottles in. If you put the bottles in first, it will create air pockets under the bottles and cause them to blow up or something. I did it with my cider and it worked well, but we did have a couple tops blow off, and one bottle explode. I had my SS top on my kettle though, so no harm, no foul. The bottles that had issues were all Anchor Steam bottles, which I had heard of people having various issues with before, so they may have just not been well capped. I will be doing it again.

Oh ok thanks for clearing it up..im gonna try this method with a backsweetened kriek lambic(few sample bottles before the whole batch)
 
How does one pasteurize homebrew? This doesn't effect flavor has anyone done it?

You can but why?

It is "clean" if you did everything correctly.

But look up Pasturization on the web... it is not just about how high the temp is... it is also about duration.

So maybe 40 minutes at 150 is the same as boiling for 5 minutes (except boiling will cause other things to happen... and change the temp of the beer.

Lower and longer is better.
 
Nano brewery! Make a batch for the local bar!

Just so you know, in the US you are not allowed to homebrew beer for sale. Period.

As far as Pasteurizing, I would skip it. There is no good reason to pasteurize fresh beer. The big boys do it to stabilize the flavors because they are brewing very light beer with very little hops and the bottles can sit on the shelves for a LONG time.

I don't know a single homebrewer or craft brewer that does it. Some of them just filter the beer to extend the shelf life, or to make the beer clear faster.

I would maybe try it 140F process for a cider though. Sounds like anything with a decent amount of carbonation might be a risk.
 
Big commercial breweries pasteurize beer in the bottle in a piece of bottling line equipment called a "tunnel pasteurizer" -it is a rapid "flash pasteurization" technique and it definitely can degrade the flavor of the beer. -Oxidation reactions occur MUCH faster at high temps and the cardboard oxidation reactions can be a result of pasteurization. (But these reactions are really a result of Oxygen + Heat + Time; if you have good bottling equipment and low dissolved O2 at bottling flash pasteurization is less likely to create a flavor problem.)

Sanitary filtration is another method to try and ensure biological stability of the beer but you're generally talking about 0.5 - 0.9 micron filtration and you're going to be removing more than just small microorganisms. You will remove color and flavor compounds, too.


I should have said that you can't pasteurize non-bottled beer (without using the low temp, long duration technique which never heats the beer above ethanol's boiling point).
I know a small cider maker who pasteurizes in a hot water bath as some have described just to lock in residual sweetness and to avoid making "bottle bombs".

Personally, I'd avoid pasteurization like the plague (as a home brewer / microbrewer) both because of the possibility of speeding up oxidation and because live yeast in the bottle reduce the O2 levels in the bottle more than almost anything else you can do (more than double evacuated, long-stem bottling machines, but I no longer have the link to back this up).


DPBISME is correct; there's many different pasteurization techniques; they all either involve greater temps for shorter durations or greater durations with longer temps; flash pasteurization via a tunnel pasteurizer for bottled beer is the most used method in brewing, AFAIK.


"Extending shelf life/stability" involves a lot of different processes. You want microbiological stability (sterile filtration and pasteurization are two common options), visual / chill haze stability (remove the chill-haze protein and polyphenol pre-cursors (many process options here) and prevent temp fluctuations that create permanent chill haze), and "flavor stability" which generally refers to preventing oxidation (proper bottling including using double CO2 evacuated long-stem bottle fillers & using oxygen scavengers such as vitamin c/ascorbic acid, oxygen scavenging caps, or yeast(bottle conditioning)) and light-struck reactions (use brown glass or "tetra hop" products for the mega brewers) as you can't prevent hoppiness and bitterness from fading over time so preventing these last two things from occurring generally isn't included in the definition of "flavor stability" as they're just pretty much impossible today.


Adam
 
I'll also note that I do use the low temperature, long duration method when I play with Lambic cultures and I want to bottle the beer. (So that I don't create bottle bombs AND so that the brett doesn't take over and dominate the beer in the bottle. Many people LIKE the evolution of brett overtime in bottles; I prefer to lock-in the exact brettiness that I want.

(Made an 1850 London porter where I aged 1/3 of the recipe on a lambic culture blend for 9 months and then blended it with a fresh version of the same beer and didn't want the brett to take over and make bottle bombs so I had to pasteurize the lambic culture portion first.) -I've still never tasted a beer like that beer and I can just read the old historical tasting notes and understand exactly what people were talking about. That Loftus the Brewer guy was a genius!


Adam
 
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