Why Ferment?

[Curtis2010]

Having no background in large scale commercial brewing, I am a bit puzzled why makers of mass produced beers even bother with the process of fermentation. At least at first glance, it appears to me that it would be much easier, and cheaper, just to synthesize or extract the desired flavoring compounds, infuse them into water, carbonate, and package. This could also be implemented as a continuous flow, very controlled and consistent process (eliminating the troublesome variations in natural ingredients which must make the brewmaster's job quite stressful).

Why do they bother? Is it legal requirements, like some jurisdictions that still require minimum percentages of certain ingredients in order to call it "beer"?

 

[Clann]

It just wouldnt be beer if you didn't ferment. fermentation changes things I don't think you can get with out it

 

[Boerderij_Kabouter]

I think there are a lot of reasons... first I will note that we would only be talking about non-romantic beers. This kind of thing might fly over the heads of the average Bud Light drinker and he wouldn't much care that his beer was really aged on beechwood chips or not, but for those in the craft market, a chemically assembled beer would take all the art and beauty out of the experience. That said, there are other issues at play.

Taxation drives this in a major way. In the U.S., malt beverages are taxed one way, wine another, and liquor different still. Also, liquor is much more regulated on sales locations, times, and all sorts of other hoops.

This is the reason for the existence of malt beverages or malternatives. These drinks are fermented with a turbo style yeast, fully striped down of flavor and nearly everything but the ethanol, then they are watered down and flavored to give you a nice crisp Smirinov Ice. The reason for the hassle is that they can then market and tax it as a malt beverage. It is not a liquor product.

Aside from those things, it would be nearly impossible to recreate the chemical composition of a standard beer. Even in something like Miller High Life, the esters, phenols, aceldahydes, heavy alcohols, and other compounds create a very dynamic beverage and a lot of that character comes from the yeast byproducts.

 

[jpc]

Almost all alcohol comes from the fermentation process; distillation of spirits can only concentrate what alcohol is already there (it doesn't create it).

Is there any other commercially-feasible method of making food-grade ethyl alcohol?

 

[Curtis2010]

I think there are a lot of reasons... first I will note that we would only be talking about non-romantic beers. This kind of thing might fly over the heads of the average Bud Light drinker and he wouldn't much care that his beer was really aged on beechwood chips or not, but for those in the craft market, a chemically assembled beer would take all the art and beauty out of the experience. .

Yes, that was the intended, if not explicitly stated, domain of my question -- mass produced beers only. Obviously producing "beer" without fermentation would eliminate all those wonderful complexities of a craft brew, but for the average Bud drinker I expect they could care less (BTW: Bud has recently started making in-roads to Guatemala...pretty ballsy...if I were their account exec I would not sleep well at night)

Given that the characteristics of the typical watered-down main stream beer are so bland (compounded by being served taste bud numbingly cold) it seems reasonably to me that a clever food chemist could come up with a reasonable approximation. After all, you can buy chemicals/extracts used to train and "calibrate" the taste-buds of beer judges, so I expect you could use many of these same chemicals to approximate the desired overall taste characteristics (esp given their much less complex nature relative to a good craft brew).

My presumption is that it all boils down to a legalistic issue: I assume you can't call it "beer" if it is not produced by fermentation...people want to buy "beer" and thus...fermentation.

 

[Curtis2010]

Almost all alcohol comes from the fermentation process; distillation of spirits can only concentrate what alcohol is already there (it doesn't create it).

Is there any other commercially-feasible method of making food-grade ethyl alcohol?

I don't know of a method other than fermentation to produce food-grade ethyl alcohol, but it can of course be produced by fermenting materials much cheaper than malted grains.

 

[Hermit]

If they could cut more corners, they would have found a way to do so already I'm sure. They probably have teams of chemists working on it and we really don't know their whole process do we? As others have stated, anything produced in addition to alcohol is just a byproduct to them.

 

[Curtis2010]

If they could cut more corners, they would have found a way to do so already I'm sure. They probably have teams of chemists working on it and we really don't know their whole process do we? As others have stated, anything produced in addition to alcohol is just a byproduct to them.

I expect you are correct: a combination of economic and legal factors probably are the primary determinants of the large scale brewing process. I've been reading a lot on beer history recently and this has certainly historically been the case for at least hundreds of years.

 

[JonM]

I say it's competition.

Brewery A says "Brewery B's product isn't even real beer! It's a collection of chemicals from a lab! It's the Spam of beer! Our product is wholesome and all-natural, made the way our ancestors did it." don't know about you, but I'm going with Brewery A.

 

[Shaft333]

My guess is that fermentation is cheaper. Ingredients don't require too much processing.
Treatment, handling etc is tried and true. Nothing special about shipping and logistics.

Synthesizing the compounds that make up a beer might not be easier, quicker, or cheaper than fermentation.

 

[jpc]

My guess is that fermentation is cheaper. Ingredients don't require too much processing.
Treatment, handling etc is tried and true. Nothing special about shipping and logistics.

Synthesizing the compounds that make up a beer might not be easier, quicker, or cheaper than fermentation.

Again, "cheaper" than what? I know of no alternatives to fermentation. What other ways are there to produce EtOH?

 

[szucconi]

My guess is that fermentation is cheaper. Ingredients don't require too much processing.
Treatment, handling etc is tried and true. Nothing special about shipping and logistics.

Synthesizing the compounds that make up a beer might not be easier, quicker, or cheaper than fermentation.

This is nail on the head. It requires only time to ferment and yeast do the work. Its the same idea as nano tech stuff. It would be very expensive to make booze any other way.

 

[Curtis2010]

Assuming that fermentation is the only technically/financially practical way to produce alcohol then you could use a highly alcohol tolerant yeast to produce a high alcohol content wort, distill the alcohol out, and then use this to infuse into the end "beer" product. This would eliminate the delay associated with fermentation, thus greatly reducing the volume of fermentation tanks needed and dramatically reducing the duration of the production cycle (time is money as the saying goes).

 

[wailingguitar]

 

[spazzy]

Assuming that fermentation is the only technically/financially practical way to produce alcohol then you could use a highly alcohol tolerant yeast to produce a high alcohol content wort, distill the alcohol out, and then use this to infuse into the end "beer" product. This would eliminate the delay associated with fermentation, thus greatly reducing the volume of fermentation tanks needed and dramatically reducing the duration of the production cycle (time is money as the saying goes).

Or don't even use yeast at all, E. coli is the fastest multiplying organism on the planet, some genetically modified strains (ie for making biofuel etoh) can pump out serious amounts of the stuff

 

[JonM]

Even if this synthetic beer could be made, no one would buy it.

I'm sure that people in a lab somewhere can make a synthetic food source that contains protein and vitamins and stuff. If the developers of that synthetic food said, "hey, we discovered a combination of chemicals that makes this synthetic food source taste exactly like cheeseburgers!" would the average cheeseburger-eating American buy it? Heck no.

 

[The_Dog_42]

Malt used in the brewhouse is very difficult to grow properly and produces a lower yield than many other crops. If you could put the ethanol into beer from another source, a much, much cheaper grain could be used to create the alcohol, reducing overhead. Also, without having to maintain the capital equipment needed in fermentation, you'd save on brewery space, water cost (of cleaning), labor from sanitizing, etc. Finally you'd save on energy cost because you wouldn't care about any by-products of hot fermentation...only alcohol. So ethanol can be made considerably cheaper.

Charles Bamforth wrote a few lectures in the modern scholars series of books. The lectures were collectively titled "Brewmaster's Art" and he goes into some detail on this. (For those who don't know, Dr. Bamforth is the chair of the Food Sciences dept at UC Davis. He is the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing, has worked in industry at companies like AB and Bass and now teaches at the premier brewing school in the country.)

In "Brewmaster's Art" he mentions that you cannot replicate the flavor of beer by taking things out of a bucket and combining them. There are hundreds of chemical reactions that occur during each phase of the brewing process. Each reactions lends something to the overall taste and there are many compounds in such small quantities that concentrations and make-up haven't been identified.

On a side note, in another book of his called "Beer is Proof God Loves Us" he even mentions that it is now possible to buy the enzymes responsible for converting startch to sugar, so the malting process isn't even "necessary." But the malting process does more than create alpha and beta amalayse. It produces a wide range of flavors and compounds, each of which contribute to flavor. So you can't even do something as simple as buy enzymes and raw un-malted barley to make a proper beer.

 

[BBL_Brewer]

Making unfermented beer would be like making tofu and calling it chicken.

 

[passedpawn]

Even if this synthetic beer could be made, no one would buy it.

I'm sure that people in a lab somewhere can make a synthetic food source that contains protein and vitamins and stuff. If the developers of that synthetic food said, "hey, we discovered a combination of chemicals that makes this synthetic food source taste exactly like cheeseburgers!" would the average cheeseburger-eating American buy it? Heck no.

Right, just like if you replaced the sugar in soda with some lab chemical (i.e., apartame). Who would buy that?

My wife drinks a mess of this Crystal Light stuff. I'd bet there isn't any recognizable foodstuff in there, but she loves it.

 

[Yuri_Rage]

After all, you can buy chemicals/extracts used to train and "calibrate" the taste-buds of beer judges, so I expect you could use many of these same chemicals to approximate the desired overall taste characteristics (esp given their much less complex nature relative to a good craft brew).

Have you ever seen the exorbitant price of those kits? It's WAY cheaper to naturally produce an off-flavored beer than to purchase one of those kits and add the off-flavor later.