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A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

arxiv.org

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Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#11

Post by bilbobeer »

'Ultra-Sound Assisted Extraction' is now being applied to all foods. To Coffee, and of course our beer.

Sonic's can effect the germination of malting barley, and like in this article replace the milling/malting phase of the brewing process.

The question to ask is why? Why apply sonic's to germinating grains? So they may germinate quicker. Why apply sonic's to malted grains, to break them up ( mill ) and to extract the sugar ( mash ) to a higher efficiency?

Why would you want to do this? More efficient mashing? ( 3% ), and germination ( maybe save 6-12 hours ), because if you brewing 100,000 liters of piss-beer an hour this is real money to be made.

Currently BUDweiser only buys the best malt, & hops. A ultra-sonic system that improves efficiency say 3-5% allow a cheaper or lower quality product to be bought and fed into the system.

What does all this mean for the home-brewer? Nada

What are the health effects of ultra-sound on germination? Nobody knows and nobody cares. Chemically what does ultra-sound do to our food when the starches are converted to sugar? Again nobody cares, google it, you'll not find a mention anywhere.

What is the benefit of changing the modern ( 500 year old ) brewing process? Nada. Belgium Monks got it right a long time ago. Like we used to say in Unix back in the 1970's, "If it works, Don't Fix It".

Slow-Food, and Slow-Beer people. That is what's best in life.

LED lights were sold, over neon, over incandescent, now we find out LED is bad, when will they tell us the ultra-sonic processed foods are bad for our health? Probably only after the corpses are on laying on the streets.

Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#12

Post by couchand »

I'm highly skeptical of the claim that such a system can plausibly "preserv[e] beer’s organoleptic qualities". The claim is repeated in the conclusion in a Trumpian fashion: "We anticipate that the new CHC brewing process affords beer of taste, flavor, body and color comparable with state-of-the-art craft beers, while offering further advantages, beyond the discussed ones, that will be the subject of a forthcoming study."

Somehow, though, that's the only mention of the flavor profile of the beer produced. They do describe measuring some key properties with a BeerLab, but those numbers hardly tell a complete story.

Given the horrid state the mash ends up in, and the fact that it isn't removed until the water has reached 78C, I'd expect plenty of tannins to be swept along in the race to efficiency.

I'd also briefly like to complain about the sad charts in this paper. What order are those bars in? Where are they drawing the conclusions in the text from? Why are the data points collected so inconsistent?

Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#15

Post by failrate »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #9

Ok, so there has to be a comedy plot in there where two guys trying to make beer with hydrodynamic cavitation end up discovering a viable cold fusion reaction but keep drinking the experiment results :-) That said, I found their off hand mention of using it as an alternate to high temperature pasteurization as much more intriguing. Mostly because I detest the "cooked" taste of ultra-pasteurized cream but have been fi…

You have accidentally recreated the plot to Young Einstein.

Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#16

Post by theptip »

mikekchar wrote: post #4
mikekchar wrote: post #3

I really only skimmed this very quickly, but it seems as though they are using a RIMS system for their cavitation based approach and an infusion mash (or maybe step controlled??? I'm not familiar with the Braumeister setup and their website is ridiculously slow) for their traditional approach. RIMS is already known by homebrewers to be dramatically more efficient than most other approaches. As interesting as it looks…

Sorry to reply to my own post, but since I finished reading the paper I can answer most of my implied questions :-) The main difference between this setup and a RIMS is that they don't mill the malt when they allow the grain to be circulated. The cavitation pulverises the malt. This is actually a massive benefit because dry milling malt is a major cause of infection in a brewery. The other benefit is that they are ab…

The OP paper's "Materials and methods" section references an earlier study of theirs on CHC: "Energy efficient inactivation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation" [1].

From the OP paper: "A Venturi tube, with the same geometry used in a previous study (Albanese et al., 2015), is used as the cavitation reactor and preferred over an orifice plate since it was observed that orifices are quickly obstructed by the circulating solid particles. "

The referenced paper gives specifications for the Venturi tube:

"The cavitation reactors used for the experiments were an orifice plate equipped with 156 holes (each having an internal diameter 2 mm) and a Venturi tube (Fig. 2A and B). Both are upscale models of effective configurations used in laboratory scale experiments by researchers in India [23, 28]. The orifice plate total opening was 490 mm2 (6.55% of the main pipe’s inner section). The corresponding value for the opening of the Venturi tube’s nozzle was 452 mm2 (6.05% of the pipe’s section)."

Might not be too difficult to obtain such a device.

1: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1002/ese3.62/asset/e...

Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#17

Post by theptip »

Some points that are interesting to me, and warrant further investigation:

1) Milling of malts is no longer required. As a microbrewery operator, now I don't need to come in the day before to run the mill for a planned brew. Massive win on scheduling and convenience.

2) "Concerning mashing and sparging, the new equipment allows to eliminate sparging altogether since the pulverization of cavitating malts ... prevents practically any starch to remain trapped into the grains". Again, from a microbrewery operator's perspective, another few hours of labour saved per brew, since I don't have to run a few sparges over my grain.

3) Since cavitation apparently sanitizes the wort, we don't need to do a boil. This saves another 1.5 hours on a brew, removes the need for a boil vessel, and some other equipment in my brewery (steam boiler to heat the boil vessel, a bunch of plumbing for said steam).

4) related to 3, the hops can be isomerized without boiling. I've had great success with low-boil techniques like the hop stand, so I'd assume that CHC beer would capture a lot more of the volatile aromatics from hops. This could lead to some great IPAs.

I'd love to figure out what the MVP is for this rig, and whether it could be replicated at homebrew scale, as it seems to simplify the process massively.

Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#18

Post by semi-extrinsic »

1_listerine_pls wrote: post #10
cthalupa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is actually a massive benefit because dry milling malt is a major cause of infection in a brewery. Don't mill in the same area you're brewing and this is pretty much handled. Lacto carries with dust, but just don't do anything post boil in that area and you're fine. >This is on par with RIMS (most reports I've heard is that people can manage mid 90s efficiency), but of course rims has to maintain a temperature…

Do you know whether low pressure boiling can kill bacteria?

I guess mechanically yes, thermally no (if you're below pasteurization temperature). My intuition would be that mechanical bacteria killing is always going to be < 100% efficient, so eventually they will be back in force.

Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#19

Post by DavidWanjiru »

couchand wrote: post #12

I'm highly skeptical of the claim that such a system can plausibly "preserv[e] beer’s organoleptic qualities". The claim is repeated in the conclusion in a Trumpian fashion: "We anticipate that the new CHC brewing process affords beer of taste, flavor, body and color comparable with state-of-the-art craft beers, while offering further advantages, beyond the discussed ones, that will be the subject of a forthcoming st…

Wait, are we now using Trump's name to make an adjective in the same way we've used Orwell's and Kafka's?

Re: A novel brewing process via controlled hydrodynamic cavitation

#20

Post by glibgil »

Dagwoodie wrote: post #5
mikekchar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but since I finished reading the paper I can answer most of my implied questions :-) The main difference between this setup and a RIMS is that they don't mill the malt when they allow the grain to be circulated. The cavitation pulverises the malt. This is actually a massive benefit because dry milling malt is a major cause of infection in a brewery. The other benefit is that they are ab…

Is this something a layman hobbyist can get into or try?

I'll just google the "Braumeister model 50 L brewer" mentioned in the paper and here you go http://shop.speidels-braumeister.de/en
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