Thursday 12 April 2018

Bollocks from The Guardian

Brewers and beer geeks across Britain have been bemused by The Guardian producing an impressively incomprehensible article about brewing. Now anyone can make mistakes and brewing can get technical at times, but the author clearly has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

Global brewery AB InBev a patented a new system for saving energy when brewing by stripping unwanted volatile compounds from the wort (unfermented beer) by bubbling inert gas through it rather than using a vigorous boil.

Bizarrely though The Grauniad starts with a headline talking about putting fizz in beer and then goes on to talk about malting and fermentation:
"The Belgium-based company AB InBev says it has developed a technique to generate gas bubbles needed for the malting of grains before fermentation without the need to boil the water and hops."
The process has nothing to do with malting, fermentation or fizz in beer so it's not surprising that so many people have been confused. If you're keen to know more about what's really going on there's some brief information about the project here and more details in the patent here.

3 comments:

  1. I read this yesterday and could not figure out exactly what the new process was supposed to do, how it worked, or what the point was except saving energy. I'm not a biochemist, ubt Iknow my way about the brewing process too.

    Thanks for the explaination!

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    1. I had a head start as I'm pretty sure I saw it in development at the University of Leuven. I don't think anyone would be able to work out what's going on just from the article.

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  2. I read this yesterday, and though 'OMG, this prick knows SFA about beer and/or brewing.' However, after reading Ed's concise sentence - "Global brewery AB InBev a patented a new system for saving energy when brewing by stripping unwanted volatile compounds from the wort (unfermented beer) by bubbling inert gas through it rather than using a vigorous boil," re-reading the original it starts to make sense. Incredibly poorly written.

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