Beer Haze, Stabilisation and Filtration Short Course
I tried but I couldn’t write a blog post about our new short course Beer Haze, Stabilisation and Filtration without using the cliché “people drink with their eyes”. The human brain which is ultimately responsible for judging the quality of every beer, is very impressionable and how a beer looks literally changes how the beer tastes.
One question this course does not answer is should beer be clear or hazy?
People like clear things. A dip in a crystal-clear ocean is much more inviting (for most people) than bog snorkelling. And a marriage proposal accompanied by a ring carrying a sparkling diamond, is much more likely to be well received than if the diamond looks like a tractor headlight. Historically, beer haze was a sign of infection and possibly staleness so as well as visual appeal, bright beer offered consumers a greater chance of an enjoyable experience for their hard-earned cash, than a hazy one.
However, some beer types must not be clear and many highly vocal consumers (and brewers) associate clarity with the emasculation of character. As a consumer, irrespective of your preference, you expect the haze (or brightness) in your favourite beer to be consistent, homogenous and as it says on the (tin) can. This means that as brewers, to keep paying our mortgage, we need to ensure that it is.
Fortunately, everything you need to know to make a beer that is as bright or hazy as desired and remains so throughout its shelf life is covered in the Beer Haze, Stabilisation and Filtration short course. It provides the very latest scientific knowledge relating to beer haze and offers expert advice on how to manage the brewing process to prevent it, or enhance its stability in hazy beer styles. The course also covers beer filtration and stabilisation in detail, from the principles of filtration to expert guidance on filter selection and implementation. The course is designed for brewers working in breweries of all scales, making every beer style imaginable.
In our quest to banish haze, decades, if not centuries of research has been carried out. As well as reams of information, this research has led to the development of the products and processes that we use to stabilise beer, or to keep it hazy today. As a brewer you don’t need all the information, but if you don’t understand what haze is made of, you might be fighting blindfolded.
The requirement for a stable haze is a relatively modern phenomenon with even classically hazy styles like wit and hefeweißbier only popularised within the last 50 years. This doesn’t mean there is a paucity of scientific knowledge of how to achieve a stable haze. It just seems that brewers of some hazy styles don’t know where to look for it.
Some of the advice found online is provided seemingly to produce beer that is as turbid as possible when packaged. Adopting this approach is unlikely to provide a haze that is maintained during the beer shelf life nor is it likely to benefit the beer’s flavour stability. As you will discover in the course, careful management of the brewing process and the haze particle size is much more likely to lead to a stable haze.
As previously mentioned, much of the course deals with filtration which is typically a brewer’s second least favourite thing that happens in a brewery, after packaging. With the knowledge gained from this course, filtration could become such a pleasure that it becomes your second favourite activity after beer tasting.
Author: Stuart Howe, Technical Development Manager