The Science of Beer
We love to share our beer knowledge with others and to help brewers and beer lovers understand the process of making beer! This is a collection of articles written by our staff about the science of beer. The full text is linked beneath each example. If you have any questions about the content, please feel free to email us.
Physiology of Flavors in Beer – Saccharomyces Species
This post is going to be more technical than some of my posts but I’m hoping that there is valuable information in here for either the science enthusiast or the guy that likes to tell people the chemical name of that green apple taste and approximately how it was made. I want this to be as specific as possible but I will try to make it obtainable to the basic reader. This is mostly a dumping ground for a few years worth of notes on yeast metabolism. There will be posts on Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, Acetobacter, and Brettanomyces at later dates, basically any organism that does fermentation, I’ll write a post about it eventually. This post is focused on Saccharomyces because you have to start somewhere and most people start here with their brewing.
Beer Microbiology – What is a pellicle?
A pellicle is the term brewer’s use for the layer that forms on top of the wort / beer in the fermenter (liquid-air interface). It can appear to be uneven or appear to have “bubbles” in it. It can also appear ropey or like a spider web. I’ve seen ones that are slimy looking or looks like small dry patches of while floating on top of beer. I’ve included a few photos of pellicles from my own fermentations found in various places within this blog.
Beer Microbiology – Lactobacillus pH experiment
A few months back a friend of mine, Mike (you may know him as the mad fermentationist), asked if I wanted to assist him in writing an article for Brew Your Own magazine (BYO) about homebrewing with Lactobacillus (here is the table of contents for that issue). After going back and forth a few times, we decided that it would be fun to do an experiment with different species of Lactobacillus available to the homebrewer rather than just a article with advice and information. Feel free to buy the issue of that magazine that has the article, there is additional information in there that I am not including in this post. I am only going to cover the experimental portion of the article here. I am not going to go over Lactobacillus physiology in great detail here, only as it pertains to this experiment in particular. For an article about Lactobacillus physiology, please read the “Physiology of Flavors in Beer – Lactobacillus“. There will also be additional Lactobacillus posts in the future on this blog, two are already in progress.
CATCH US TALKING ABOUT BEER
This is a podcast where our head brewer, matt humbard, discusses the science and art of mixed fermentation of beer, wine, mead and cider.
Our Brewer Matt Humbard stops by beer me radio to do a deep dive into the wonderful world of yeast with host sarah Jane Curran.
Our Brewer Matt Humbard discusses how to pull every drop of smelly goodness from hops through distilling hop oils (and how you use it)