Does pasteurization affect the taste of imported beer?

Should have been: I have not heard of this differentiator before.

Doh!

Cheers!

 

Yeah, sounds like nonsense to me. The TTB regulates beer, domestic and imported, with the FDA also involved to a lesser extent. Flash pasteurization of kegged beer wasn't really practical until the 1960s with the development of the Sankey keg. The BATF (which preceded the TTB) even had a ruling about in 1965 - USE OF THE TERM "DRAFT BEER" ON LABELS AND IN ADVERTISING OF BEER. I'd imagine there are still some smaller/specialized brewers overseas that might still export non-pasteurized beer, both kegged and packaged, to the US. (Altho', off-hand the only brands I recall that made a point of it were Grolsch and Asahi.)

"Skunky" beer is more properly called "light struck" and it can happen in minutes to several hours, depending on source of light, color of bottle, type of beer, etc. But the distance a beer travels when it is in a sealed cardboard case is not a factor in a beer becoming light struck. (Also, people has been putting lime in Mexican beers, particularly canned beers, long before Corona became popular in the US.)

Diageo closed the Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London in 2005.

At some point either Stroh (which licensed the brand up until 1999) or Pabst abandoned the microfiltered/sterile fill "Piels Real Draft" - even changing the name to "Draft Style" and noting it was "Pasteurized" (as required by TTB regulations when using the term "Draft" for a packaged beer).

The strange thing is that Pabst contract-brewed most of their beers at MillerCoors plants, which are set up for microfiltering/sterile filling since they brew two of the biggest selling such beers - Coors Banquet and Miller Genuine Draft. Looks like the current Molson Coors website dropped their "How We Brew" pages, but it used to say under "Packaging":

"Cold Filtered" is Miller's terminology for microfiltering.
(Maybe Pabst didn't want to pay extra for it? And, yeah, they eventually dropped the Piels brand and it's now controlled by the family of an ex-Piels executive).

 

Curious. I don't see how there could be enough oxygen ingress through a bottle cap seal when the bottle is pressurized with CO2 to make a difference. Perhaps it's quantum tunneling. :-)

When I was living in Vienna, I once had a pack of Ottakringer Helles where the seal had failed on one bottle and it was absolutely flat - not the slightest pop when opening the cap or any fizz when pouring into a glass. Being curious (read: stupid) I tried drinking it anyway. The flavor was very different - much sweeter (I assume because of the lack of carbonic acid) and actually quite pleasant. I wouldn't say that it was stale (oxidation), and apparently I survived the experience.

I'm beginning to think that the bottle vs can difference might be more due to the plastic liner in the can and differences in pasteurization than leakage through the cap on a bottle.

Does anybody notice a difference when cellaring a beer bottle on its side vs standing up?

I've always been told that wine bottles should be on their sides, but that really only applied to bottles that were corked as opposed to bottles with screw caps. I keep my wine on its side in both cases.

 

The laws of Physics rule here (i.e., Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, Frick's Law).

The cap liner is oxygen permeable.

Cheers!

 

Or maybe atmospheric pressure is slightly higher than what CO2 pressure exists inside the bottle and air slowly gets thru that slightly permeable plastic seal? Just guessing.

Well it kind of looks like @JackHorzempa is saying the same thing.

 

Yupper,

The fact that there is a lot of CO2 within the bottle does nothing to stop the O2 ingress. This is defined by Dalton's Law of Partial Pressure. The rate of ingress is defined by Frick's Law.

SCIENCE!!

 

The Guinness in London is all brewed in Dublin. The Guinness brewery in London closed many years ago.

 

I am not convinced that this applies to any extent, just how permeable is the joint between cap and bottle considering that beer remains carbonated for years?

 

About 7 ppm of oxygen ingresses per day across a typical cap liner.

Entirely up to you whether you want to be 'convinced' here.

Cheers!

 

That surprises me. But from my cask drinking experience, small amounts of oxygen transform beer.

 

Something we can agree upon.

During my numerous visits to the UK in the past (business trips) I drank many, many pints of a 'variety' of cask ale:

• Some good (fresh cask)
• Some glorious (a day or two after tapping)
• Some 'yuck' (too many days after tapping)

Cheers!

P.S. Some pubs were better at 'managing' these 'transformations' than others. An aspect of consideration of economics I presume.

 

I agree with @jesskidden that transportation has nothing to do with skunking (unless light-struck during transportation), and would also add that skunking has nothing to do with pasteurization or age. Corona skunks when light-struck in the clear bottle, period. Also, lime doesn't come close to covering the taste of skunked beer, which should just be drain-poured. If you can't find un-skunked Corona, why buy it? You should buy it canned, or just drink craft.

 

Waaaaaaay too high here. It's more like 1 ppb ingress per day on a crown cap but depends on how good your seal is. Even 1 ppm of total package oxygen is catastrophic to beer shelf life (breweries shoot to get under 50 ppb total package oxygen) so 7 ppm a day would be very bad news.

 

It could be that adding tunnel pasteurizers to can lines became the norm when these breweries added cans in addition to bottles, and/or planned for the cans to go further from their home markets. A tunnel pasteurizer is typically located on the outlet of the filler, before the labeler (you're using hot water jets so cant pasteurize a labeled bottle) so it's a big modification to add to an existing line. I know of a couple American breweries that only added pasteurizers to can lines because they planned on canning beers with fermentable sugar.

 

That value of 7 ppb was provided by Peter Wolfe who is a Brewing Scientist at Anheuser-Busch. He is very knowledgeable on this topic since he was directed to develop/implement improved cap liners for his company.

He discussed this topic in a past thread:

“At Anheuser-Busch we developed our own crown liner material that scavenges oxygen because we weren't satisfied with what was on the market. To answer someone's earlier question, we found (at AB) that a crown liner without any kind of O2 scavenger would let in about 7 ppb of O2 per day. That's a lot!”

If you have conducted your own experiments and can provide lab measured data, I would be interested in reading the technical paper with this data included.

Cheers!

 

Which is why Anheuser-Busch spent the money to conduct lab research and develop their own proprietary cap liner for their bottle beers.

Cheers!

 

That is possible.

Do you know of any US breweries that sterile filter their beers?

Cheers!

 

I have no understanding of brewing to any degree. But it would seem to me that the source of the infections are the barrels themselves, is there not a way to sterilize only the barrels and not the liquid going into it? As an example I worked for a medical company that used to gamma sterilize their blood lines, in package and boxed up to ship, it penetrates that packaging. We also had a contract for a chicken plant where we gamma sterilized the chicken and out it went into distro. This was 1980s, surely there’s science now to allow the same results.

 

I've never heard of this. Seems strange to me unless they have the ability to pasteurize one package format and not the other. My initial thought was that this was a misunderstanding from draught not being pasteurized but package being so, but that's not the case here. I suspect there's something more to the equation that we don't know... Do they contract brew or have separate breweries for canning vs. bottling?

 

I used to sterile filter beers at Blue Pants. I think it's pretty common.

Barrels could be pasteurized with steam. I prefer to pasteurize after bottling for certainty that nothing could go wrong in the bottle. Say you pasteurize a barrel, but you have a wild yeast colony on your transfer tubing going in, or out, or you have a contaminant in your packaging line, or the bottle itself, all of that would be killed if the beer is pasteurized post-fill.