Yeast immobilization: magic beans of fermentation

[WortMonger]

Stir plate sounds like a fun experiment, but if you are going to add electricity to the mix why not recirculate the wort through a packed column of beads. You could use a whole house water filter with clear housing to hold beads or pack a pipe with beads.

I'm thinking this is exactly what big breweries do for what they call accelerated maturation for cleaning up beers based on their vague descriptions. I always wondered how they contained yeast to pass beer through. I was thinking it was a filter pad impregnated with yeast, but this makes more sense.

Also, wouldn't this type of clean fermentation work extremely well for lagers like American lagers with the beads during primary? Ales would worry me being to clean without the subtleties of yeast flavors. But... crisp clean lagers sounds like a match until we can get an experiment of the same wort with two different beaded yeasts to see if we can still get those wanted flavors from our varieties.

 

[MalFet]

Nothing new to report, though I'm going to cold crash these soon for packaging. Both the beers are very clear, and there's relatively little sediment in the bead jar. The beads have started sinking, which I suspect has to do with the release of trapped CO2.

this is great.

couple of tweaks you might like,

1) foam the gels, with pinch sod bicarb, (increase surf area)
2) to make a skin that don't leak yeast, dip in a weak food grade chitosan solution, (dissolve in citric or lactic acid, pH 4). This will make a complex coz alginate -ve and chitosan is +ve

Amazingly good already though, excellent for controlling bottle carb sediment. When I used to make home brew as a kid they had a yeast in the kits that sedimented as a jelly layer on bottom.Same idea but this beats it hands down.

Very cool. I really like the chitosan idea. Maybe I'll look into this for the next round.

Stir plate sounds like a fun experiment, but if you are going to add electricity to the mix why not recirculate the wort through a packed column of beads. You could use a whole house water filter with clear housing to hold beads or pack a pipe with beads.

I was thinking of something along these lines. I ferment in cornies, and it would be simple enough to rig a peristaltic pump up to a water filter housing. Interesting...

 

[Warthaug]

Gotta love homebrewing - as simple as making beer is, we'll always find a way to make it harder!

I'm really interested in how this all turns out - out of curiosity, do you have access to a microscope? If so, an image of the beer may give you a better idea of how many yeast are escaping the beads...

Bryan

 

[MalFet]

I'm really interested in how this all turns out - out of curiosity, do you have access to a microscope? If so, an image of the beer may give you a better idea of how many yeast are escaping the beads...

I do, though it needs a minor repair to be working again. I probably won't bother testing this batch, though, since I'm pretty sure I had some surface yeast go renegade. I'm going to try running this set of beads through fermentation a few times, and by that point hopefully I'll have gotten the microscope fixed.

 

[bdh]

I'm thinking this is exactly what big breweries do for what they call accelerated maturation for cleaning up beers based on their vague descriptions. I always wondered how they contained yeast to pass beer through. I was thinking it was a filter pad impregnated with yeast, but this makes more sense.

Also, wouldn't this type of clean fermentation work extremely well for lagers like American lagers with the beads during primary? Ales would worry me being to clean without the subtleties of yeast flavors. But... crisp clean lagers sounds like a match until we can get an experiment of the same wort with two different beaded yeasts to see if we can still get those wanted flavors from our varieties.

I'm not sure if this is how they still do it, but in 1999 Miller published this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9933520

They played around with using both a bed of glass beads and a silicon carbide cartridge to immobilize the yeast. I'm not sure how their systems worked exactly, but it seems like the yeast would still be able to reproduce in one of these setups - and they report higher ester content than what they get from a typical batch fermentation.

 

[brant740]

I was thinking of something along these lines. I ferment in cornies, and it would be simple enough to rig a peristaltic pump up to a water filter housing. Interesting...

I was thinking about cycling the pump every 15 minutes to let yeast work on a small batch.

Another option would be to setup a thermosiphon. Corny output pipe would run to the inner pipe of a side arm/tube-in-shell heat exchanger and warmer water would flow through the outer shell. Wort would rise through the Yeast tube at the top cool and fall through the input tube of corny.

Benefits would be:
1. Reduced number of pumps.
2. Higher gravity wort would sink to the bottom first. Frequently brewed beers could be in large continuous fermenters, removing beer at fg from top then adding new wort to wort that has not hit fg yet.
3. Corny could be kept at temps below 40 to limit unwanted wild yeast growth while keeping yeast balls in their comfort range.
4. Control of fermentation temps
5. Thermosiphon is slow so yeast will have time to convert.
6. Tech is proven in HVAC industry and readily available.

 

[brant740]

Nothing new to report, though I'm going to cold crash these soon for packaging. Both the beers are very clear, and there's relatively little sediment in the bead jar. The beads have started sinking, which I suspect has to do with the release of trapped CO2.

Will you do a taste test before bottling?

 

[WortMonger]

I was thinking of something along these lines. I ferment in cornies, and it would be simple enough to rig a peristaltic pump up to a water filter housing. Interesting...

This fits along nicely with how I plan to dry hop while remaining under pressure. This would just mean another housing, possibly in parallel so I can bypass until I'm ready for the hops. So many ideas.

 

[RugenBrau]

facinating post! Only on HBT

 

[notfound]

Cool! Subbed.

 

[user 54565]

I wonder if there would be a way to merge the cointreau caviar with the magic beans, and just add them to a simple white wine for a poor man's sparkling wine (think traditional method without having to remove the yeast at the end of it).

Maybe low and slow boil the alcohol out of the cointreau, to not kill the yeast, and then use that to create the medium? Or anything with a faint color, like the red food coloring that was mentioned a few pages back? Call it a decorative choice, like the old drink "bawls" ...

Or, heaven forbid, do the magic beans themselves taste horrific? I know, strange question. They would likely be easier to filter from a sparkling wine, and wouldn't make sparkling wine cloudy as it is refermenting in the bottle, so they could have additional benefits if anybody wanted to try sparkling wine. However, it wouldn't allow autolysis, which is an important flavor profile.

Hmm...

 

[FlyDoctor]

Perhaps I missed it, but why do you assume the yeast cannot reproduce on the beads? Given the importance of yeast cell growth in the elaboration of esthers etc (at least, thats what I read and hear) -brewing with senescent (non dividing) yeast seems like it will be like adding everclear to wort.

 

[ACbrewer]

Perhaps I missed it, but why do you assume the yeast cannot reproduce on the beads? Given the importance of yeast cell growth in the elaboration of esthers etc (at least, thats what I read and hear) -brewing with senescent (non dividing) yeast seems like it will be like adding everclear to wort.

yeast growth is limited by a few things. One of them is available space. Since the yeast in the beads are at or above density, they don't reproduce. There obviously is plenty of food and other nesc things, but as they are trapped in/on the beads, space/density is limited

 

[FlyDoctor]

yeast growth is limited by a few things. One of them is available space. Since the yeast in the beads are at or above density, they don't reproduce. There obviously is plenty of food and other nesc things, but as they are trapped in/on the beads, space/density is limited

I understand he theory - but I'm wondering if it is known that the density of the yeast in the beads is at the maximum - has the lack do growth been empirically determined?

 

[Zider]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/8679112/?i=27&from=yeast alginate chitosan

Thank LiX

 

[FlyDoctor]

Sweet - thanks! pubmed no less.

 

[suregork]

Whether or not there will be any growth inside the alginate beads will depend on the initial concentration of cells within it.

Just some examples that yeast growth inside alginate beads is very much possible:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11947-010-0379-4 (Fig 2)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032959201001728 (Fig 2)
http://www.aseanbiotechnology.info/Abstract/21009438.pdf (Fig 7)

 

[emjay]

Very cool. I really like the chitosan idea. Maybe I'll look into this for the next round.

As I mentioned a couple times early on, chitosan can be used to increase the porosity of the beads. There are a few reasons one might do this, but the principal potential benefit seems to be to improve the speed of fermentation (based on the current limited data, anyways).

It's worth a try, IMO, but I also lean towards the idea that agitation of the wort would probably be a much more effective solution - for the same reason that Damp Rid (calcium chloride dessicant) only does much good in a temp-controlled above-zero "freezer" when you happen to add a fan to get the air thoroughly circulating: the yeast, just like the desiccant, can only work on what it can actually "touch".

It's unfortunate I don't have my brewery set up in my new place yet. I have a test model of the so-called Black Maxx stir plate (made for and marketed mainly to homebrewers) and it is more than capable of stirring a full carboy. I've been meaning to experiment with such agitation even just using "free range" yeast, but the idea of using it with immobilized beads adds a whole 'nother element. I'm thinking an extremely neutral beer may be able to be fermented and brightened in much quicker times with the use of beads in agitated wort than is otherwise possible. And bringing it full circle, it could possibly be even faster still by using chitosan to increase porosity, but of course that is likely to affect the fermentation in other ways as well, which will obviously need to be experimentally determined.

Maybe this is what I need to light a fire under my ass and get the eBrewery completed once and for all...

 

[MalFet]

Here it is!

After a long, angsty wait, I finally busted out the clean and carbed beers and poured another triangle test. This time, I believe, there's a fair comparison to make: there was no acetaldehyde or any other sign of greenness in either. They are identical in appearance and both relatively clear (though with a bit of chill haze). In short, I'll keep tasting them over the next few weeks, but I suspect that what is true now will be just as true then.

The differences between the two are stark. But, to my surprise, one wasn't necessarily better than the other. I tend to prefer English beers and ultimately favored the regular ferment over the beads. My wife, on the other hand, goes more for West Coast IPAs and she chose the beads. Both were flavorful and drinkable, at least as far as would be expected by the very simple recipe.

The control batch was very English: grainy and a bit sweet with a distinct apple/pear follow-up.

The bead batch was clean and firmly bitter, but not at all flavorless. At risk of oversimplifying, it tasted like perfectly competent California Pale Ale (minus the late hop character).

I always knew intellectually that yeast played an important role in perceived bitterness, but I was really taken aback by how much of a difference shone through here. It's hard to be objective since I knew the recipe, but I would have guessed 15 IBUs versus 30 IBUs if I had to put a number to it.

----

In short: I'm very pleased. The immobilization process had a very large effect on the beer's flavor, but it wasn't a bad effect in any sense. Anyone hoping to simply reproduce their old favorite recipes this way will struggle, but I now believe that it might be possible to produce really good beer with alginate beads. I came into this very skeptical, and I'm much less skeptical now.

There is still a tremendous amount that's unknown. I don't know, for example, how this process will affect different yeast strains or different styles, nor do I know how things like temperature and pitching rate factor in. It's very hard to generalize much useful information from this single test, but the results here were good enough that I would now be willing to try this process out on a full batch.

I hope other people will too, and I hope they'll post their results. It might look complicated, but the process is actually very quick and very simple. The supplies are cheap, and there's really no special equipment necessary other than an eye dropper and a wire-mesh strainer.

So, have at it folks!

 

[TANSTAAFB]

You my friend are a rockstar! Brewstar? Thank you for the experiment and the results. Very interesting that identical wort and identical yeast strain and generation produced such starkly different results. Also good to know that the product of the immobilized yeast still had good flavor, albeit different flavor. I will be very interested in what results you get with repeated use and possibly different strains.

And I am very interested in engaging in my own experiments once I graduate and reclaim some of my time!

 

[passedpawn]

Nice Malfet!

I've got my alginate here and plan to make beads with lager yeast and brettanamyces tomorrow.

 

[TANSTAAFB]

Awesome! Brett beads! That would make secondary fermentation in Saisons a breeze if the flavor profile is OK. I love you guys =]

 

[passedpawn]

Awesome! Brett beads! That would make secondary fermentation in Saisons a breeze if the flavor profile is OK. I love you guys =]

Yea, should be cool. I've got brett B. and L. I'm going to use the food coloring to color them differently... woot!

 

[LabRatBrewer]

I love this thread, I wish I understood it.

 

[Hermit]

Yea, should be cool. I've got brett B. and L. I'm going to use the food coloring to color them differently... woot!

Might I suggest, once more....

http://empco.org/edu/index.php/pyrocystis-fusiformis-11.html

 

[TANSTAAFB]

Might I suggest, once more....

http://empco.org/edu/index.php/pyrocystis-fusiformis-11.html

Just for arguments sake, are you suggesting to immobilize the algae with the yeast in the alginate? Does wort constitute "growth medium?" That would be awesome if it worked but something tells me bioluminescent yeast beads can't be that simple!

 

[Tantalus]

Is there any possibility that Brett. and other sour beads would minimize the possibility of having issues like barrel contamination for long-term sours?

 

[passedpawn]

Might I suggest, once more....

http://empco.org/edu/index.php/pyrocystis-fusiformis-11.html

I did look into that for my reef tank. Very cool. I'm not putting that into my beer. I'm guessing that the low pH (ocean is 8.3), lack of light, and ABV would all act to kill it pretty quickly.

 

[passedpawn]

Is there any possibility that Brett. and other sour beads would minimize the possibility of having issues like barrel contamination for long-term sours?

I'd say yes to minimizing the risk, no to eliminating the risk. As mentioned before, a second "yeast-free" layer on the beads would further reduce the number of cells escaping the beads. It's what I aim to do with the beads in the next few weeks: experiment to reduce, as much as possible, escaped yeast.

 

[WileECoyote]

Thank You MalFet, for taking the time not only to test, but also posting every step and tasting results.

Please correct me if I miss read/understood your results.

This sounds like some, could utilize the yeast beads in creating stronger IPAs using less hops, thus saving money, sounds like a win win for people that enjoy IPAs and or, cleaner, less yeast flavored beers.

Cheers