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New brewing Method Means Faster Beer, Less Waste
thatshortkid writes "A brewmaster in Germany has invented a cylinder that fuses yeast to the sides, allowing the yeast to do its fermentation job faster. A process that normally takes 10 days now takes a few hours. Also, yeast that normally has to be changed out after three brews can now last up to six months to a year."
They'll be a downside. It will all taste like shit (coors, heineken) or something.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
*hic*
Now if you can just add a clock and a timer this thing could brew my morning beer before I get up, just like my coffee maker. :-)
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If you believe in fairies, it'll equal lower beer prices.
If you live in the real world, it means higher profits and layoffs.
vk.
but.. if you don't count the taxes beer _IS_ pretty damn cheap already, compared to other drinks(milk, juice, stuff like that).
i'd wonder more about what kind of new beers will come because of this, because obviously it allows the process to be changed.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Faster doesn't always mean better.
What does it taste like?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
If you want less expensive beer, and good flavor (or any flavor for that matter), brew your own at home.
It can be far more economical, and you get braggin' rights to boot.
i'd wonder more about what kind of new beers will come because of this, because obviously it allows the process to be changed.
It doesn't appear to change the process, only accelerate it. I can make all sorts of beer at home with all sorts of weird ingredients. But it takes 10 days to ferment, and another 3 day to carbonate. At that point, you've got a good idea what the beer will taste like. It may need a longer time to bottle condition before the best flavor comes out, but it's drinkable after ~13 days.
A commercial brewer skips the carbonation step, and injects CO2 into the brew. So commercial beer is ready after ~10 days.
The biggest advantage here is the ability to experiment. The new system is 1/10th the size and faster. Kinda like switching from a render farm of desktops to Dual Proc rack mounts. Now you can run a lot more tests in parallel. The density and speed allows you to try something out that you normally wouldn't waste more limited resources on.
Personally, I'm planning on setting up some 1 Gallon batches of beer, and trying a bunch of different things. If it's bad, then it's only a gallon of bad beer to drink. Those 1 gallon jugs of bottled water are perfect for experimental carboys.
And it's easy to get started. I swiped a 5 gallon jug from the office water cooler, saved up 5 twelve-packs worth of import bottles, and went to the local Home Brew store. (import bottles are important, most American bottles are twist off, and those won't work.)
:-)
They had a nice kit for getting started that had 2 plastic buckets, an airlock, some plastic tubing, and a bunch of stuff that I don't use (hydrometer). You can get off even cheaper if you're willing to use more elbow grease. On top of that, I needed a bottle capper, bottle caps, and a beer kit.
Followed the directions included in the kit, waited 2 weeks, filled the bottles, capped 'em, waiting another week, and enjoyed some great brew.
Initial outlay was about $100 (Starter kit was $80, Beer kit was $20). It'll cost $20 to $30 for every 5 gallon batch, if I buy the hold-your-hand Beer Kits. 5 gallons makes me about 50 12oz bottles. At $10-$15 per twelve pack in the store, I save $10 to $45, depending on what I buy at the store.
Like any hobby, there are lot of toys you can add. I used the beginner setup for a couple years, but started to get tired of washing bottles my hand, and controlling the bottling flow by hand. Another $40, and I think I'm done with my washing and bottling accessories.
Makes me wonder if the idea doesn't scale well. That said, IAAB (I am a brewer; I worked in a brewpub and brew on premises for several years and home brew), and I wonder if it might not still be a boon (boont? mmm...amber...) to smaller breweries, brewpubs, and especially brew on premises. Most brewpubs go through much smaller amounts of any given beer than they brew, and this might be away to "brew on demand" or the like, and give a fresher product.
For brew on premises customers, instead of brew, wait two weeks, come back and bottle, it could be brew in the morning, bottle in the afternoon, and might appeal to more people that way. I recall a fair number of people who were put off by two week wait.
And all that said, it seems like there will still be call for the more traditional brewing process, as different beers, etc. use different fermenting processes (lager = cooler, bottom-fermenting yeast; barleywine = two fermentations, one with wine yeast; lambic = 'spontaneous' fermentation)
The higher profits will be a signal to others that there is money to be made. They will step in, and in order to make money they will use the more efficient methods, undercut the price and sell more, trying to make money like the original pioneer.
The pioneer will then lower their price (or raise their quality) or go out of business.
Since there are more players in the market than before, productive workers originally laid off will be hired by the competition or become the competition themselves.
The winners are consumers who enjoy better quality, lower prices, or most often both.
When another development in efficiency or quality changes the production cost point again, the new profit margins will again signal to ready entrepreneurs that there is money to be made. Consumers enjoy another round of lower prices and higher quality.
If the governments weren't printing money like it was going out of style, a steady deflation would be the rule (again) as this progression of improvements in quality and efficiency continues to occur in every field and industry.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Yes, but watch out for the water! I live in the UK, and was born "up North", where the water is "soft". My father used to make a lot of his home-brewed beer, and apparantly it tasted quite nice. We later moved "down South", he got his brewing kit out again, and made a batch. This time, it tasted like crap because the water where we then lived is "hard". He had to chuck the whole batch away.
Me? I hate beer, will never touch the stuff. Now, if I could only make a home-made Baileys set...
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This sounds cool, but what about mead? I love the stuff but it can take months to find out if the batch is good.
Ahh well some things are worth the wait.
Heineken? Fuck that shit, Pabst Blue Ribbon!
Most Home Brew stores stock water additives for this purpose. If not, you can find them online. It's not an easy task to adjust your water though, which is why I swipe the bottled water from work.
Once you've got a 5 gallon jug, you can fill it up pretty cheap with good quality water at most US supermarkets. The supermarket down the street has reverse-osmosi filtered water for 25 cents per gallon.
The original IPA (India Pale Ale) was brewed in an area of England with hard water, so some recipes for IPAs add gypsum, etc. to the water when preparing the wort, to simulate the original water. You wouldn't want it for most beers, but IPAs are hoppy enough that you wouldn't notice water changes as much.
And Coors is proof that good water doesn't necessarily make good beer.
You just have to brew beer styles that work with your local water, although, in my experience, the effect of the water on the final product is overstated. If you have hard water, you just brew a Burton-on Trent style pale ale. With softer water, you could try your hand at a Bohemian style Pilsner. However, I live in Adelaide, which has probably the hardest water in the world, and I just make what I feel like. It all turns out OK.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Sorry to reply to myself, but to help the Northern-Hemisphere centric readership, Adelaide, South Australia gets their water from the Murray river. The end of the Murray river, which has been raped for thousands of miles of its length for irrigation and hydropower (not to mention the ever-increasing salinity of any runoff). What used to be the most bitchin' river in Australia now actually has NEGATIVE flow at times, that much has been taken out of it. The poor buggers in Adelaide have to drink that salty crap daily. The big Hydro/irrigation project of the '50s may not have been the bright idea it seemed.
sustainable living
in Holland Heineken is considered piss, according to the people I know who drink beer (I don't drink any alcohol out of principle) it is only slightly better then budweiser (which is described as pee from someone who drank Heineken). Brands like Dommelsch, Grolsch and even Bavaria are preferred over Heineken here....
Until you talk to someone else, who claims that only Heineken is perfect and all the other brands suck. Mostly which beer is considered best is regional (Heineken/Amstel in the west, Grolsch in much of the east).
In reality, all Dutch pilsener is very very close in taste (with a few exceptions, basically the really cheap C brand supermarket stuff - but perhaps I'm influenced by marketing even there). I've done many blind tests, where people get beer (from bottles) in glasses without a brand name, and had to guess what they were drinking. Generally people score about as well as you would expect from a random pick.
I've had someone who grew up with Grolsch, and claimed that was far better than Heineken, even though he had been running a bar with Heineken on tap for years now, mistake one for the other. Many of these "beer experts" claim that the difference between those two is huge...
In my opinion most (all major brands) are pretty much OK, if not very special. If you want to drink interesting beer, the Belgian stuff is available everywhere. German beers are much more varied as well. And of course there's plenty of great stuff in the Netherlands as well - but generally not the pilseners, and anybody who claims pilsener brand X is "piss" compared to brand Y is a marketing/groupthink victim.
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