Micro-brewing goes more micro with extremely small-scale experiments

"This could encourage breweries to be adventurous with their brewing conditions and may very well lead to new styles of beer."

(My bolding in the quote from the article.)That's a very brief article and right to the point of it's intent; however, I don't see how this could create new styles just because the quality of the barley can be more easily verified. It seems to me that a recipe is a recipe regardless of the quality of the grain it uses, and the quality of the grain doesn't change the style.

If science can validate the grain's quality on such a small scale test, then that's the only value that I see from this experiment. (Maybe it being Sunday morning I'm not thinking deeply enough to see otherwise.)

Thanks for posting it.

 

Always enjoy hearing about new reasarch breakthroughs and technological innovation in brewing. Good read.

 

Interesting coincidence- for that beer he used the exact same amount of hops as in a standard production batch of Bud Light!

 

From the paper:

"I was looking at barley protein changes during the mashing stage of beer brewing, when one of the paper's reviewers asked if the changes were caused by temperature or time spent mashing the barley," Mr Kerr said.

Perhaps a fine point for some but what is being studied here is the production of wort. This is just the beginning of the brewing process. The next two phases, which are beyond this aspect:

· The brewing process (i.e., boiling of the wort with hop additions)

· The fermentation process – the yeast ‘transforms’ the wort into beer

Cheers!

 

But, the barley doesn't matter. Only the malting.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...-winemaker-making-90-6-packs-of-lager.654097/

 

What it seemed like - to me - the author was thinking with that suggestion was that this technique makes experimenting with process so much more economical that there would.be a dramatic increase in research and development of novel mashing techniques that could lead to novel styles.

My thoughts are that this is most likely to be used by industrial mega brewers to explore processes to produce wort more efficiently. I can imagine that they might.be interested in things like super high pressure/high temp techniques to, basically, advance their existing "high gravity" brewing and make it more time/energy/ingredient efficient.

With a more romantic hat on we can imagine ambitious micro brewers letting their imaginations run wild and subjecting malt (and other grain/grain products) to all sorts of unusual processes and uncovering novel approaches that produce truly unique beers