Bottled beer stability

[GlacierBrewing]

I'm looking for advice on increasing our bottled product stability in the marketplace. Not all of our retail accounts "get it" that we do not sterile filter nor do we pasturize. Sometimes I see our products sitting in a display on the warm store floor and I worry about taste and safety issues. We filter most of our beers using k300 pads, plate and frame. I realize this is on the finer end of coarse filtering but I'm wondering if anyone is using some sort of additive that would not affect flavor but allow the beers to take some retail-oriented abuse. Although the beers appear nice and clear, I know that there are some yeast cells still in suspension and left long enough on the warm store floor, bottles could rupture.
Any advice?

Prost!
Dave

[Swordboarder]

Dave,
As long as your fermentation has finished out there is little risk of additional fermentation in the bottle unless you have a contamination problem. We add finings during transfer to the bright tank and then bottle. No exploding bottles.

As far as flavor stability goes, you may run into some problems. But there currently isn't much research that has been done on the effects of high specialty malt beer and high hop beer in flavor stability. But if you're packaging, do yourself a favor and save 12 bottles every packaging run. After 3 months, do a side by side tasting of your beer at 0 days, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days, both storing the beer warm and cold.

Cry a little bit, your beer only slightly resembles the beer you produced at the brewery.

You'll likely attempt to fix the problem on the brewing side, but this will only get you so far. Your real enemy is time and temperature. The other way to go is to attempt to reduce the time and temperature in your supply chain. Keep your distributors at a 2 week inventory. Keep yourself at a 1-2 week inventory. This will work unless you run into any production problems or you end up selling a lot more beer suddenly. You'll pull your hair out, but the beer will be a little bit better.

[Woolsocks]

I don't package, but here's my $0.02 anyway —

At Siebel they told us a couple things about packaged beer quality — 1) packaging beer damages it and your job is to minimize that damage and 2) Time, temperature, and oxygen are your three enemies.

I'd be more worried about oxygen in my bottles than a few yeast cells. With nothing to eat, the yeast aren't going to do much to your beer. In fact, they may even help you out by sucking up some of the O2 that leaks in through the crown seal (even when sealed correctly, they leak).

I'd also have a talk with your distributors and see what can be done about this whole "beer sitting warm" thing. Explain that your beer contains "critters" and isn't designed to sit warm. Personally, if I were packaging, I wouldn't intentionally sell to places that were going to let unpasteurized beer sit warm on the shelf.

Making sure there's as little O2 in the bottle as possible when the crown is sealed is probably the single best thing you can do for your beer. Any oxygen pickup prior to bottling is also a "bad thing".

As far as additives, you could think about trying some of the commercial anti-oxidants available. Ascorbic acid is pretty common and can be found blended with other anti-oxidants as well. You could also try those crowns that absorb incoming oxygen.

[TNbrewer]

To continue on Woolsocks' oxygen theme, you could try oxygen scavenging or oxygen barrier crowns.

You could also try pvpp, silica gel or a combination of the two. I've used both with no noticeable effect on flavor. I haven't used them together but I know a very large craft brewer uses a combo on their very tasty beers. Used in the right amounts they will increase stability and not harm the beers.

Cheers,

[South County]

Rogue, Founders?

I would also like to know what processes, or lack of for that matter, breweries like Rogue and (Founders specifically) use, whose packaging states "always unfiltered." I was doing some recon at a local distro and saw those two cases and was surprised by that. I'm in PA and Rogue is on the other side of the country so you know months go by before the beer is consumed. Most all retail case accounts in our area store beer on shelves at 70F or so.

[bunnyfeet]

Woolsocks is right in that time, temp, and oxygen are the enemies of packaged beer. Regarding time, any packaged beer will have a max shelf life under the best conditions - oxygen does leak in through crowns, and the oxygen in the beer when it's bottled will also oxidize the beer over time, giving oxidation off-flavors.

Warm storage will accelerate these oxidation reactions... so lean on your distributors (who should already know how to treat beer) and your retailers to treat it better. They may be used to handling suitcases of major brewery beer, which can handle a lot more abuse.

Regarding pvpp/silica gels, those are for colloidal stability, to prevent haze and such - one works on haze-active polyphenols, and the other on haze-active proteins, which combine to form haze. So that will keep it looking good, but will not prevent oxidation flavors.

[brew4you_]

I think the OP was looking for some numbers (or formulas?) to determine the length of time his beer is good at. So lets all assume sitting at around 70 degrees under standard bottled conditions... Whatta ya say?

[Larry Doyle]

If the micro load is high enough, unpasteurized beer will start to go bad 24 hours after packaging. If the poster cares enough to convert worry into action, he needs to start routine micro testing and also routinely retain large numbers of samples for future evaluation.

[Roger Greene]

Forced Ageing

It might also be a good idea to force age some samples, this way you can know before the beer on the shelves goes bad. Holding the packaged beer at 37-40°C for a day or so (depending on what time scale you want to test, but I am not sure of the exact times) does a great job at bringing out the stale flavors and speeding up any microbe growth.