Study of physico-chemical parameters in smallscale craft beer production

Abstract

In this past decade, the craft beer market has been gaining importance from large national andinternational beer breweries, especially micro-breweries and brew pubs. The evidence of thiscompetition is the fact that many large companies’ advertisements remind the public that theirroots were originally a microbrewery (1,2).However, the smaller budget of microbreweries incomparison to large companies, requires greater efficiency because a big loss for a smallbusiness would be a significant cost which could affect the competitive power of the companyin the market.In our microbrewery we have been studying different physico-chemical parameters (pH anddensity between others), changing critical steps in the elaboration of the different craft beersand analysing which factors influence these parameters the most, with the objective of makingthe beer production much more efficient. At the same time, we are going to compare theseparameters between the different types of beers that we produce in the factory.Our results show that the pH is slightly more acidic in beers that use a lower proportion ofPilsen-type malts. In relation to density it seems to be the opposite, the higher of thisproportion of this type of malt, the higher the density. Furthermore, some correlation has beenobserved between the degree of milling and the density, with a higher degree of milling of thegrain the higher the density is in the wort which allows to use less malt for the same volume,something that can have beneficial economic repercussions.Another problem that we found in this kind of industries it's the contamination of the finalproduct. However, we have designed a plan for waste management that consists in all thecontaminated beer previously analysed, is distilled in an alembic that extracts the ethanol fromthis useless product, that could then be used to make different valuable alcoholic drinks (gins,vodkas, whiskies, liqueurs). The point of this waste management plan is to reduce the costs aswell as improve the efficiency. We observed that the higher the alcoholic strength of thesubstrate to be distilled the greater the alcoholic strength of the final product. At the same time,the higher the volume to distill the longer it takes to start producing the final product