Yeast in your beer

I used to be a fan of yeast in beer. It's not that I no longer am, but that my focus has changed a little. I came into the beer scene whilst running a pub that majored in real ale. Back then the idea of craft keg was barely a thing in the UK. Cask was king, and of course still remains so in many pubs and ares, even if stunning keg beers are really starting to take off in a good and positive way. Cask is unfiltered and generally contains at least some live yeast. Cask remains stubbornly a sign of quality beer for many, despite the major disadvantage of variability of actual dispense quality.

Bottled beers are, in reality, a different matter altogether. The Belgians seem to do bottle conditioning very well indeed. Some British breweries can do a good job. In reality though, it is an extremely difficult thing to do well, needing a knowledge of the residue fermentables in the beer to be packaged, the current carbonation level and a yeast cell count and viability. Equally there may need to be oxygen present if secondary fermentation is to occur, but not too much, else the beer might stale early.

We have bottle conditioned in the past. We intended to produce entirely bottle conditioned beer originally, as we felt this was the "right" thing to do. We still occasionally play with the technique. What we have found is that the consistency of the finished beer is nowhere near as reliable and consistent as when we simply bottle with carbonation that is picked up in tank.

As a bit of a background, our bottling filler is a counter pressure filler. What this means is that to operate correctly there must be balance between the pre-pressurisation of the bottle and the head pressure in the filler bowl. Failure to get this right messes up the operation of the filler valves and can cause fobing of the beer and so incorrect fill. It just doesn't work right if no pressurising gas is applied.

The problem with this is deciding whether to use CO2, nitrogen or air as the counter pressure gas. If using CO2 with bottle conditioning it can be the case that there is insufficient oxygen dissolved in the beer and therefore there is slow and unsatisfactory secondary fermentation. Using air at pressure might over-oxygenate the beer, causing premature staling. There isn't a correct answer, but one solution used is to ensure minimum residual fermentable sugars, by ensuring complete fermentation, carbonating to a satisfactory level, possibly even chill filtering, or centrifuging and then re-seeding with enough yeast just to give an illusion of bottle conditioning. There will be a tiny amount of secondary, but in reality the only thing this does is mops up stray oxygen, although there is a strong argument for saying this is a good thing.

We used to do this faux bottle conditioning, as do quite a few breweries that have beer in the Good Bottled Beer Guide. We probably could have continued to do this, and so maintained our listing, but we recently decided that this wasn't what was best for our stunning beer.

At the end of the day, a business has to do what the people who make up the customer base really wants the business to do. When we put yeast in our beer we got more complaints about the beer than I was happy about. Gushing bottles, flat beer, beer with bits in it and other failures that are clouded by the questions of whether it is in fact faulty beer, or just consumers not understanding how bottle conditioned beer might behave.

I think the people want great beer, consistently and without bits. We have changed now to a process that drops the beer bright in tank, carbonates in tank and then we put through a rough (nominal 5 micron) filter just for security. There may well be traces of yeast get through, but we do not guarantee a cell count. What we are looking for is minimal secondary fermentation in bottle, as the carbonation levels are exactly as we want them at bottling. The double pre-evac bottling system reduces oxygen in the bottle to an absolute minimum ensuring long shelf life.

The relatively rough filtering ensures that all those stunning hop characteristics we've worked hard to put into the beer don't get stripped out again by a stupidly tight 0.45 micron filtration system often employed for bottling.

And it seems what we are doing now is exactly what the people want. We're getting much love for our beer on twitter etc as it rolls out into Morrisons and Marks and Spencer's. This is helped by the fact that the beer is very fresh. Just today I had to stop typing this post to go load pallets onto the waggon bound for the Morrisons' depot. Some of the beer was still in a tank when I got up this morning. You can't do that with bottle conditioning, and there is now some question in my mind that suggests that really great hop-forward beer degenerates during the secondary fermentation stage. Not so with tank conditioned beer. It's great just as soon as it's bottled.

Economies of scale

We spent most of the weekend bottling Infra Red. We only bottled 260, that's not really very many for the man hours that went into it. To be fair, most of our labour is either very cheap or free, I don't pay myself anyway and we have a willing volunteer who even goes home and blogs about the beer. All he cost me was a bottle of Tokyo*. Of course there was also Alfie, but he's working for his University fees. The thing is, at the present rate of bottling it just isn't economic, at least it wouldn't be if we had to pay wages for the man hours.

Today Ann has been looking at means of speeding up the process, which involves spending money we haven't got. As we have no idea how big the market is for our bottle products it makes it difficult to be sure how much to invest. The minimum investment, which is about all we can afford, will get us little more than a few more filling heads, which is one of the current bottle necks¹ in the process. A little more expenditure would gain us some form of labelling machine, which would be nice, as hand labelling is slow, has variable results and is the most tedious job in the world after cask washing.

Of course we could spend many tens of thousands of pounds on bottling equipment, which would enjoy the economies of scale associated with high throughput, but without developing a market first we cannot even start to contemplate such investment. Without the economies of scale the beer cannot be sold at a low enough price without risking our dwindling cash reserves being further reduced. Without cash reserves we cannot invest in the equipment required to ensure we can produce beer at a reasonable price. It's to do with cash flow really.

In reality this results in all our bottled beer being relatively scarce. Even if we produce more we still have the logistical problems of getting it into various outlets, the transport costs can easily annihilate any profitability.

If you see Infra Red for sale in bottle you are an extremely lucky person indeed. I advise that a small amount of money is sewn into the lining of your jacket to ensure you have the capability to purchase such a rare commodity irrespective of the quantity of reddies that may or may not languish in your wallet.

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¹you really do not have to laugh.

Bottle it up

I had a little bit of excitement last night. No, not the bedroom type, well, maybe that as well, but that would be telling and anyway, that bit of my life will stay in the bedroom. No, I became excited as the result of voyeurism over the procreation of some tiny micro organisms that go by the name saccharomyces cerevisiae. These little wonders are better known, of course, as ale yeast. I'm a little cautious of posting here about this excitement, not least because I suspect many of my readers, if they have home brewed, will wonder why a professional brewer is getting at all excited about such a thing.

I still wonder at the magic of "Godisgood" whenever these marvelous fungi turn large amounts of a sugary liquid into beer. The yeast's waste products being alcohol and carbon dioxide, both of which are essential for good beer. The first time I made beer for commercial consumption was something of a life milestone. Made possible by many factors and quite a bit of help from various sources. Later, I sent some to be bottled at a local bottling plant. I went to witness this historic moment; my own beer being commercially bottled. I'll be honest, I did feel slightly emotional driving away from the bottling plant with the first case of beer sat beside me. Again, another life milestone.

I mention here about the relative economies of bottling beer by hand over sending it for contract bottling. I've come to the conclusion that we are better off hand bottling in very small limited edition versions. One cask out of a single brew. That way we can sell the stuff here and have the draft version on sale for customers to try before committing to the bottle.

A week ago I bottled some of my beer here. The plan was to condition in the bottle the good old fashioned way. No chill filtering¹, no carbonation with CO₂ that lacks provenance, just good old fashioned secondary fermentation. But I was worried that the priming would be wrong, or that there was not enough yeast. Would I get some condition into the beer?

Well, after waiting a week I cracked open a bottle last night. "Bubbles!" I exclaimed "It's got condition!" I suspect everybody in the bar thought I was barmy². But my first bottle conditioned beer worked. I've sold some today³. Another life milestone. It's nice to feel things firming up, the plan, that is.

Now, before you all get carried away and start asking me to send you some, it's not for sale outside my little pub. Mainly because I suspect you lack the sophistication......oh, no, that wasn't it. No, it's because the beer isn't good enough yet...no, that's not the reason either. Oh, yes, I remember, it's because I need a day off and if I have to brew more to satisfy a wider market I'll not get one, sorry. You'll just have to come and see me here. Perhaps, if I make something exceptional, I'll consider selling some during the winter at a ridiculously inflated price that is worthy of the handcrafted nature of the product.

¹I am considering reseeding with a different yeast. There are some advantages in doing that. That might result in me filtering the base beer after primary fermentation. I would still consider that to be real.

²OK, everybody who was in the bar at the time knows I'm barmy. It was just a little more evidence for them.

³No, that's a lie, Tom did. He's our newest barman. He's doing OK and is showing all the signs of a good salesman.