Preservative Free Microbrew

[sinkas]

Hi all,
I keep hearing craftbrewers, booze shop workers, barstaff, cashed up bogans and microbrewed beer enthusiasts repeat the fact that microbrewed beer is "better for you" because "they don't use any preservatives".
Is this really true?
More to the point how many of these demonic compounds do the Mega breweries actually use?
And heaven forbid that any of your beloved microbrewing bretheren might slip some into thier brews too?

So is this a worthy point of contention, or is it simply anther borish marketing catchphrase to get people off the megaswill and onto the good stuff?
If it is just spin, it seems to work.

I am suspicious.

Maybe noone cares?

 

[///]

i thought co2 and alcohol were pretty good preservatives myself.... is how much people drink or the 'chemicals' put into a commercial beer? I know which i favor and it aint the chemicals!

scotty

Hi all,
I keep hearing craftbrewers, booze shop workers, barstaff, cashed up bogans and microbrewed beer enthusiasts repeat the fact that microbrewed beer is "better for you" because "they don't use any preservatives".
Is this really true?
More to the point how many of these demonic compounds do the Mega breweries actually use?
And heaven forbid that any of your beloved microbrewing bretheren might slip some into thier brews too?

So is this a worthy point of contention, or is it simply anther borish marketing catchphrase to get people off the megaswill and onto the good stuff?
If it is just spin, it seems to work.

I am suspicious.

Maybe noone cares?

 

[Whistlingjack]

Hops is a great preservative too. Its antimicrobial properties are widely known.

Preservatives are used to prolong shelf life and can impact on flavour compounds. There are a myriad of chemicals used ranging from ascorbic acid to sodium metabisulphate.

Some of the chemicals can also trigger histamine responses in drinkers such as blinding headaches, asthma and skin rashes.

WJ

 

[Murcluf]

More to the point how many of these demonic compounds do the Mega breweries actually use?

Third hand imformation from a conversation I over heard from a bloke who went on a Victorian based Mega Brewery in house brewing short course. He was saying they use 600 odd different additives in there brewing I gather this was across all their brews. Like I said the info is third hand so I don't know how accurate it is but it doesn't suprise me in any way.

If anyone can clarify this it would be great.

 

[amita]

great question Sinkas, cant contribute, just lurking and interested,
cheers amita

 

[Online Brewing Supplies]

I know of one Micro near the Swan Valley that adds Head foam agents to all beers for head retension and Fruit syrup which does contain preservatives to there "Fruit" Ale but I think this is an isolated case.
GB

 

[dig]

Most large breweries will flash pasteurise the beer and/or sterile filter and/or tunnel pasteurise the finished product. SO2 levels in beer have to be very low, I think it's less than 0.1 mg/litre (0.1 ppm). The whole preservative thing is a bit of a red herring.

Most additives in beer tend to be 'fasteners' or 'fixers'. Fasteners, or processing aids, get beer out the door faster and cheaper and may include mash enzymes, antifoams, yeast nutrients, fining agents and the like. The 'fixers' are the bandaids applied to bad brewing practice, such as foam enhancers, colourings, stabilisers and the like.

I'd be surprised if there were 600 permissible additives for beer... Check it out on the Food Standard Australia and New Zealand website.

Craft brewers shouldn't need to do much if they're using real malt and hops. Brewing with rain water, I obviously need to add calcium salts to my mash liqour, I use a kettle fining that contains pvpp to prevent chill haze, and that's it. Good malt, good hops, good water and good yeast.

 

[Whistlingjack]

I'd be surprised if there were 600 permissible additives for beer]

The food standards allow most of the available preservatives to be added to beer.

600 would not be out of the question, but obviously one producer would not add that many.

The fact is, most compounds derived from beer production can be artificially manufactured, independent of the brewing process. Beer contains over 1200 chemical compounds, so if a company can produce these in a laboratory, at a lower cost, then they will.

WJ

 

[matti]

The fact is, most compounds derived from beer production can be artificially manufactured, independent of the brewing process. Beer contains over 1200 chemical compounds, so if a company can produce these in a laboratory, at a lower cost, then they will.

WJ

Right on the Money WJ
These chemical compound are generally made my a separate industries.
It is purchased by the food and bevarage industries from third party and added to their products.

It is my opinion and many others that:
Natural derived compounds through the process of brewing give a better end product!

Matti

 

[Belgrave Brewer]

I know for a fact that at least one microbrewery in Victoria does not use any preservatives at all. Just malt, water, hops and yeast. I'd be willing to bet that most of the microbreweries are the same.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Some first hand information.. for the slightly larger of the two Aussie mega brewers

To the best of my knowledge the only "preservatives" that are added to the beers are potassium metabisulphate and ascorbic acid (which is vitamin C) and not at very high levels at all. They are mainly to act as anti-oxidants and there isn't really all that much of them.

The other things that go in are as has been mentioned, brewing aids rather than preservatives, things like pvpp and silica gel which come out again during filtering and some enzymes both during the mash on some beers and into the final product as a long term protection against haze.

The notion that the big breweries use these things because of "bad brewing practices" or as cst saving shortcuts, is a bit misleading too. You have to remember that when you brew a beer (talking light lagers here OK) if it lasts six months and is still tasting and looking OK - you've done well. But a mega brewer has to make product that looks and tastes perfectly to specification for 9 months, whether the bottle shops carefully stores the stuff in the cool room, or whether it sits on a container ship for two months getting rocked back and forth (which causes haze) or in the shed out the back of the bottle'o' in 30 heat. The customer neither knows nor cares what the beer has gone through before it gets to them, if its inside the used by date (9 months from prod date)... it has to be good.

That takes a little doing.

Thirsty

 

[the_fuzz]

Good post TB,

However, I find that people generally do not care about the facts - they just like to live in a fantasy world and LN and CB are the big bad dragons, whereas people like Coopers are seen as the good guys........ go figure

 

[///]

Good post TB,

However, I find that people generally do not care about the facts - they just like to live in a fantasy world and LN and CB are the big bad dragons, whereas people like Coopers are seen as the good guys........ go figure

Not a finer few words said. The technical skills in the big houses are awe-inspiring. Sometimes a case of 'not liking' a beer vs it being 'bad quality'.

So what is a preservative - technically speaking?

 

[dig]

The nine month thing has more to do, in my opinion, with the beer still looking good at the end of its best before date. Flavour-wise, most nine month old pale, filtered lagers will be shot to pieces.

And by 'bad brewing practice', I was talking about the likes of adding Tetra hop and/or Propylene Glycol Alginate to augment poor foam that results from 40% sucrose and high gravity brewing. 'Unnatural practice' may be a better term.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

The nine month thing has more to do, in my opinion, with the beer still looking good at the end of its best before date. Flavour-wise, most nine month old pale, filtered lagers will be shot to pieces.

And by 'bad brewing practice', I was talking about the likes of adding Tetra hop and/or Propylene Glycol Alginate to augment poor foam that results from 40% sucrose and high gravity brewing. 'Unnatural practice' may be a better term.

Ours aren't. They may not suit a craft beer palate in the first place, but they taste pretty much the same at the end of the 9months as they do at the start. Very well trained tasters spend considerable time on triangle tests to determine these things.

Mind you I agree, a hell of a lot of it is too do with appearance, and indeed we do add tetra hop... but thats hops so I wasn't really counting it. I'm not aware of any PGA but I suppose it could be there.

And whether high gravity brewing or using sugar adjunct (its not 40% and its not all sucrose) can be considered either bad or un-natural practice is debatable. The Belgian use plenty of sugar and brew the odd high gravity beer and no one questions it... all we do is add some water back at the very end of the process. What makes ours less "right" than theirs??

/// hit it on the head. The fact that people don't like the flavour of a lot of the mega brews doesn't make them bad beer, they are almost uniformly beers of such quality that most homebrewers could only dream of matching them. Its a matter of recipe and taste, not of quality.

Now I happen to be on the same side of the flavour preference fence as you are. I don't much go in for drinking the beer that I spend considerable time and effort to make well when I am working. That doesn't means its not good quality beer, I just dont like it so much thats all.

Sorry to rant. I'll pull my head in now.

Thirsty

 

[sinkas]

Good post TB,

However, I find that people generally do not care about the facts - they just like to live in a fantasy world and LN and CB are the big bad dragons, whereas people like Coopers are seen as the good guys........ go figure

I think your probably right here.
I guess the progression of my argument, is that:
1) The "Preservative free" marketing line is a rather flimsy one, but one that the megaswill makers dont seem to have bothered countering
2) Often the marketing of microbrew in austrlaia appears to be done by people who dont know what they are doing.
2a) Struggling microbrewers are beginning to use marketing that attempts to use the drinkers perceived image to get them to change thier habits, which to me is just copying the big breweries, and failing to provide actual evidence for the alternative. (eg Gage roads new geezer pleezer premium lager)
3) Microbrewers, often appear to use their david and goliath type struggle with big breweries as a way of guilt tripping the public into trying their product.
4) I dont know anything about marketing

 

[PostModern]

'Unnatural practice' may be a better term.

IMHO, they (LN, CUB etc) manufacture beer rather than brew it. Sure, brewing is part of the process, but it is a manufacturing process first. We here all know what beer should be like, the big guys know as well. So, as you say, they apply these "unnatural practices" to their beer in order to meet their commercial demands. I'm all for a return to the small economy in many things, especially beer and food, stuff we put into ourselves, purely to get away from these unnatural practices.

 

[warra48]

I ccouldn't give a toss about any of this.
I don't buy or consume megasawill products (with the exception of a Tooheys Old because the old bastards at golf insist on buying me a beer). I even take HB around to the outlaws because of the ***** he has in his fridge (his last effort was Hahn low carbohydrate, spare us).
My own brews are made only from water (I don't mess with it in any way, filtered tap for ales, rain for lagers) malt, hops, and yeast.
I never have a headache other than when SHMBO complains about my drinking habits....