Infection/Quality Problems: what we should know

I think it was mentioned earlier that many new breweries are in former warehouses with open windows and bay doors, visitors and deliveries constantly coming in and out, that you have to wonder about what is blowing into the brewery and how it effects their QA. But more to your point, when I visit breweries, particularly the open air warehouses, I'm going to make a point to look for or ask about what QA equipment they have. Not to call them out, but just to make a mental note for myself...

 

I've been in many breweries that lack equipment, yet the smallest brewer I personally know invested in a high quality microscope and cell counter. So both ends of the spectrum exist, which I guess should not be too much of a surprise. And I admit to being a fanatic with a pretty strict view of these things. I walk through tours with a very critical eye and I do spot the poor piping design and other sloppy things I worry about in my house. I've been to growing (and a few well-established) breweries that openly admit they lack a QA lab and staff, but I've also been to breweries large and small that have full blown food safety programs and microbiologists on staff. It's all over the map, it seems.

I know the food regs that apply to what I do reasonably well and know what programs I must have in place even for my tiny R&D facilities. I don't know what, if any, regulations apply to breweries. So while I admit my ignorance freely, it just seems too parallel for there to be nothing in place given today's concerns about food safety and security. Our facility tours, for example, are highly controlled/restricted/supervised and our visitor policies are extremely strict. As respected as I am, even I can't just walk in to one of our facilities these days. Yet some brewery tours you can walk about wherever you like with a beer glass in your hand. Just in terms of liability, that doesn't seem wise. Maybe it is part of the appeal and fits the mental image of what a "craft" business is - the romance of the whole thing - but bad things can surely happen.

In my business, we do have to be worried about pathogens as well as spoilage organisms and that does create a significant point of distinction. Spoilage organisms for us light up the 1-800-WHINE line, but we do have a few pathogens which have to be taken seriously. The former creates a temporary and mostly manageable negative impact on the brand which I guess would be the equivalent of an infection. The latter can obviously be much more serious and wreak total havoc with the brand equity. Our programs, policies, and procedures exist to handle both and we're fortunate that incidents are rare. But it takes work and commitment to make it all happen and not let product out the door that could come back and bite us. I have watched QA evolve from being the police catching things after the fact to being collaborative partners in all aspects of the business dedicated to finding and preventing things before they happen.

Somewhere there must be a happy medium, I reckon.

 

Every now and then I am in a new brewery that has basic lab equipment. Not many of those new ones around, and you could wager that one of the owners has a microbiology background, or been to Brewing school.

 

They should try forcing some samples. That's what brewers did back in the day to spot potential problems before a beer was sent into the trade.

 

Surely boiling during the brewing process would take care of any microbes on the hops? I could only see it being a problem if they were used as dry hops.

 

No. A good Stout should develop with age. If Courage Russian Stout had been pasteurised bottles over 20 years wouldn't still be improving.

 

Had a 2009 Abyss (the year when almost all of the bottles were infected) about 4 years after its release.

Actually wasnt all that terrible. the infection was mild compared to others i have heard about.

 

Yes it would, and I am talking about the ones that use "green" hops post-boil. The terminology around the hopping techniques is weird!

 

I don't necessarily agree that flavor developments are a function solely of yeast in suspension with a beer style like stout. Most of the changes that we as beer lovers describe in an aged stout seem to be a function of oxidation over time. Only time will tell with this exBEERiment.

 

Hops contain anti microbial compounds. I have never had an issue with infections associated with dry hopping.

 

Have you ever dry hopped using Wet Hops (i.e., hops that have just been picked off the plant)?

If so, how long did you drink those beers (e.g, a few months post packaging?)? How did you package your beer and what were the storage conditions?

Cheers!

 

It's also possible to pasteurize the beer and then bottle condition it with fresh yeast. New Belgium does it with La Folie, and I'm pretty sure Boulevard does it with some of their bigger beers that have seen barrels or cold-side spice/fruit additions.

 

Hops that have been dried have things going for them - low water activity will prevent microbial growth, the heat of kiln-drying will have killed some critters, and as noted the famed anti-microbial properties. I'm not talking about beers that have been "conventionally" dry hopped. I am talking about ones that take the cones direct from the bine to the fermenter or hop back, skipping the drying process and not being added to the boil as @JackHorzempa said. It would also not pertain to pasteurized beer - bottle/can conditioned only.

http://allaboutbeer.com/article/wet-hop-beer/

Jack and I had a little dialogue going a while back during "fresh hop" season about whether a "wet hopped" beer - ie, fresh whole-cone hops added to the cold side of the process in an unpasteurized beer - could develop an infection that would only manifest itself as the beer sits in the bottle. The presumption is that, like any other agricultural commodity, freshly harvested and unprocessed hops will harbor some sort of microbiological load and there would be nothing in the process (wet hops, added to cold side, no pasteurization) to knock the "count" down. Assuming all of us hop fiends buy this particular type of brew and drink it quickly as intended, no one would ever know assuming it was consumed before the "infection" manifests. Which raises the philosophical question - is a beer that exhibits these symptoms "infected" and should the brewer of said beer put a "best buy" date plainly on the package and get the beer out of distro when it "expires"?

We also wondered whether pasteurization, either flash or tunnel, would alter the delicate desirable flavors of the "wet" hops and essentially defeat the purpose of a beer created to specifically showcase a different hop profile versus the dried hop counterpart.

It's kind of like the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it does it make a sound thing. If a beer is infected by some presumably slow-growing organisms and is consumed before the off flavors show up, is it actually infected? Yep - a mind is a terrible thing to waste

 

Well the analogy isn't bad, but it still is an analogy so I'd argue for "yes," it is actually contaminated. The fact that an insensitive and fallible measuring instrument (human taste buds) doesn't detect the contamination leading to off flavors doesn't mean it isn't present and going to come back to "bite someone" in the form of off flavors, etc. That's why diagnostic lab testing becomes critical and what it is designed to accomplish/compensate for. The beer is flawed from the beginning and it only requires the proper stresses for that flaw to become critical even though pretesting does not reveal the flaw. So a better analogy might be a structural member in a bridge, which has an imperfection during fabrication that only shows up under prolonged repeated stresses cause cracking or breakage. The structural member was flawed but the flaw not easily detectable.

Hence the critical importance of your suggestion to the colleague who retired. A little of the right expertise available at the right time and place can save lots and lots of headaches and hassles even if it doesn't prevent them all.

 

not sure if anyone already requested this, but can this be stickied?

 

People age sterile filtered beers all the time - Brooklyn BCS for example - and take advantage of the oxidative process. Yeast in the bottle may be preferred, but not necessary. In the case of BBA beers it may be a good tradeoff.

 

Michael is Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout solely filtered? There is no pasteurization involved?

Cheers!

 

That's actually an assumption, but I think a pretty good one. Most crafts of the era when it was developed were filtered and not pasteurized.

 

According to the below linked source, sterile filtration is not truly sterile (maybe sanitation level would be a more appropriate term?):

“The brewer should set a specification for the maximum allowable concentration of yeast and bacteria in sterile-filtered beer since not all microorganisms are removed by sterile filtration. Opinions differ about what is the critical level for contaminants, and for beer it has been set at between 4 and 10 yeast cells per 12 ounce bottle. In the case of lactobacilli, it has been reported that between 1 and 3 organisms per 12 ounce bottle is acceptable. In other words, there is no universally agreed-upon minimum safety level for Lactobacillus sp., and use of the term "sterile filtration" can be misleading.”

http://beer-brewing.com/beer_brewing/beer_filtration/sterile_filtration.htm

Cheers!

 

That is great when the brewery actually cares. I bought several cans last summer of an amber ale produced and packaged here in MI that was clearly not tasting as intended. It was tart and funky, almost tea-like in flavor, certainly not what one would expect from an amber ale. It wasn't unpleasant, actually but obviously not as intended. So I emailed the brewery and they replied, indicated that this was their first canning run (using a mobile service) and that the cans they are selling (from the same batch) out of the fridge at the brewery taste great. He blamed the distributor and retailer for not storing the beer properly prior to sale??? A friend of mine (biologist) plated the beer and apparently it was teeming with live yeast that apparently ate up the "malty backbone" one might come to expect in an amber ale. Despite this new information, the manager of the brewery still tried to convince me that they were not at fault and that it was a storage issue. My thoughts are that if a slight, or even moderate temperature change (increase) results in a significant change in that beer yielding undesirable results, the brewery should evaluate what happened.

With an incident like this happening to a large brewery with excellent microbiological testing resources, one can only imagine how frequently it happens at breweries that do no testing at all?