Sour beer

Transcription

So when you come to Food Science, we have three options within our degree program. We have a traditional food science and technology option that students can choose. About thirty percent of our students are involved in that. We have a fermentation science program, which is all things fermentation: bread, wine, beer, cheese, things like that. Students that are interested in those will go into the fermentation program. We also have Enology and Viticulture option, which is specific to wine and viticultural practices. If you look at this picture here, this is our wine program. That's a real famous guy in Corvallis now. That's Dave Tackus from Two Towns Cider. He's a graduate of our program. This whole group of folks here, some of them have moved on and gotten fabulous jobs in the food industry, the wine industry and the beer industry. Because that's what we do. We train people to do specific things. We're very hands on, and that makes us pretty unique. There's only one other four-year brewing school in the country, and that's in Davis. So our kids know how to hook things up, they know how to turn valves, they know how to work on pumps. They know how to make beer. Not just intellectually know how to make beer, but they know how to hands on, make beer. Most of our kids are home brewers on the side at home. They like to come in and have fun on the big system, which is really a small system, but to them it's a small system. This is a picture of me in a tuxedo. And Doctor Tom Shellhammer. He's the guy I work with. Seventy five percent of my time is in the brewing program working with Tom, helping him with his research program. And I'll tell you a little about that. The guy in the middle here is Ian Bearpark. He's the production manager for a small Deschutes-size brewery in the Midlands in the UK. He makes a fantastic beer called Bomber. It's a cast-conditioned English style beer. It's really delightful, sso I had the privilege a few years ago to attend the institute of brewing and distlling's Midland meeting in the Burton on Trent region. And this is kind of like the Master Brewers of the United States that I belong to, a bunch of regional brewers. When we get together for the Northwest section, everybody is wearing dickies and pants or they're wearing shorts and flip flops and it's very informal. But when you go to these meetings in the UK, you're in tuxedos and you're in big halls. It's just like being in Harry Potter. It's pretty fun. But I show this picture because it's got Tom in here, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what we do in Toms program. But OSU has had a long connection to hops and hops as well as beer, but in 1932 we started a hop program in Oregon State University, and most of that was because of downy mildew being discovered in Oregon hops. In the 30s, 40s and 50s, Oregon was the hop capital of the United States if not the hop capital of the world. We produced a lot of hops here. In 1979, the industry got together and formed the hop research festival, which is a consortium of brewers, hop growers, hop brokers, and hop researches, and we get together and figure out where the hop industry needs to go, what kind of varieties need to be developed, what kind of disease resistance. And as you guys all know now,1996 is when we started our fermentation science program. We started this program with a gift from Jim Berneaux, who is a CEO of Willamette Valley Vineyards. He used to be the CEO of Norwester Brewing Company. Anybody remember Norwester? Yeah. How many people own stock in Norwester? Anymore? Zero. But, Jim gave us a gift of a brewery, which was fantastic. He also gave us some money, but some of that money was tied into stock in Norwester, and we weren't able to cash all that out before Norwester went under, but thanks to Jim Berneaux, we actually started our fermentation science program and we've gone miles ahead of what we thought we would do with this fermentation program. So in the Shellhammer lab, we do a lot of work on isomerization kinetics of hops. And if you're not familiar with the brewing process, you add hops to water while it's boiling and you're trying to extract the acid out of hops, and if you boil them, heat them, it changes the chemistry of the hops a little bit so they become more soluble in water. So we've done work on the kinetics of that. A lot of bitterness research. You think about doing sensory on here, everybody raises their hand. They say, "I wanna be on your panels. I want to taste beer." But we don't always do fun things. And tasting bitterness in beer is not always fun. Yeah, you get to taste a lot of beer, but the beer is usually not very sexy. It's usually more like Bud Light or something is the medium we have it in, and there's all different kinds of hop compounds that we look at and try to evaluate the bitterness of the beer. He's a little time intensity chart of when we're doing bitterness in beer. We have intensity on the left and duration of the bitterness. Things that you don't really think about when you're drinking a beer in the pub, but when we're in the laboratory, we've got 12 people that are concentrating on the bitterness of the beer in the sample they're tasting, and they'll taste it and they'll think about the bitterness. How bitter is it? How long does that bitterness last? What kind of bitterness is it? We've also done foam studies and flavor abilities. Most everything that we do in the lab revolves around hops because Oregon still produces a lot of hops. We grow 5 percent of the world's crop of hops. It's a big deal, and we like that because we're in the Northwest and we study hops. It makes us unique. Nobody studies hops like we do. This is some of the current research we're doing right now. So what I wanted to talk to you guys about is contrasting Belgian flanders-style beers, and here's a nice picture of a flanders brewery and U.S. flanders. It's not the last time you're gonna see him. So this is part of a talk I gave at the World Brewing Congress this summer. I just pulled some information out of here to share with you guys. We had the privilege of having some left over money in the coppers, and we were just finishing up a sensory panel on sour beers, and we thought it would be really cool because sour beers right now in the United States are taking off. We have a great example up in Portland, Cascade Brewing Company, which is making some tremendous sour beers. Lots of other folks have sour programs. Even though they're making beers, they have barrels tucked away somewhere that they're fermenting and letting sour. A lot of time these folks are trying to immolate a style that is located in the North Eastern part of Belgium up here. This is the Flanders region. And most of the beers that we looked at in this study were from this area where the circle is. So we have these old world tradition of these Flemish beers that have been made for eons, and they're really good beers, and we have a lot of US brewers that are making red sour beers, so we thought, well, gosh, how are these Beers the same? How are they different? What we decided to do was get some Belgian beers, get some US beers, look at them with a sensory panel, and look at them analytically in the lab, so we took 6 Belgian beers and 7 US beers. The Belgian beers were procured through an importer. The U.S. beers, we got donate to us through craft breweries who were anxious to see how their Beers stacked up against the Belgian beers. And we kept all this anonymous amongst the breweries and sent them reports with their beers identified to them so they could look at their beers and see how they compared to the Belgian beers that we were comparing them against. So we did instrumental analysis and descriptive analysis using a sensory panel. This was a fun panel. it wasn't like tasting bitterness in beer. We got to taste good beers. So people were excited to be on this panel, so our methods for instrumental analysis: We looked at Organic Acid, Lactate. We look at Esters, Alcohols, and I'll kind of go through what all these smell like down the road. But we also looked at some strong analytical parameters that we look at when we look at beer. How bitter is the beer? What color is it? What's the PH? How much did it ferment during the fermentation? How alcoholic was it. We had 11 people on a sensory panel. Nine of them were beer consumers and two of them weren't, and it's good to have people like that on a panel for you because they're not familiar with beer and they give you good feedback. They kind of anchor your panel, and tell you when your panels getting out of wack, because sometimes when you have a lot of people that really enjoy beer, they have a tendency to be biased. So we had these 13 beers. We did 5 training sessions and 10 testing sessions. Usually we do more training sessions, but we'd just gotten finished with a sour beer testing and some of the beers we were examining here we'd already looked at before, so our panel was pretty well trained. It was easy to get these guys used to the testing sessions, and when we're working with human beings and we're testing them and we're giving them samples of beer and we're trying to illicit a response from that and we're trying to assign a number to that. We're trying to get something physical that we can look at and look at statistically. It's always difficult because humans change from day to day. Sometimes we have a lot of bias. We look at things a way that we shouldn't. We're not like an instrument that you can calibrate, run a sample through and get a response from. That's what makes humans great. Things are always different. We vary, but as a sensory panel leader, it's difficult to stay on top of that. So we typically in our testing sessions do a lot of replication so we can even out data as it comes through. So we did 6-7 samples per testing sessions, and then we look at our beer measurements. These are the measurements we use that are real standard for beer. We had bitterness units. In the yellow here are the Belgian beers and in the red are the US beers and if you look at bitterness units from 7 to almost 20, you can see the US beers vary. They spread out. And the Belgian beers group real tightly together. So as far as bitterness went, these Flemish beers were not very bitter. These Flemish beers were very low on the bitterness scale. When you look at alcohol, the US breweries were higher in alcohol, but a big spread. Titratable acidity, this is kind of a measure of how sour the beer is, how ascetic the beer is. And you look at the Belgian beers, they group up here with one outlier. One guy that's sitting way up here, and the American beers again really spread out. We found that throughout the study, that the Belgian beers tended to group real rightly together, but the US beers, just a huge range. Huge range, and we kind of expected that, so this is Esters we're looking at things that are fruity, tropical fruit, pineapple, melon. The American beers as a group had more of these kinds of compounds in them. The data here, you see the Belgian beers really grouping out, and there's always one outlier that just sat kind of out there and used our data around a bit. And you'll see this later in some of the examples I have. It was a very unique Belgian beer and outside of the realm of a lot of the ones we looked at. We have banana flavors and rose and floral. The rose and floral was about the only attribute we found that was higher in the Beligan beers than it was in the US beers in the analytical compounds that we looked at, so our organic acids, we thought we would find more a difference here because of the Titrtable Ascidity, but there really wasn't too much there. And a lot of these compounds here where we found fruity, cherry, nail polish remover, sweet butter fruity, the American beers were still higher than the Beglian beers, but it really wasn't that significant. So this is the analytical stuff we just looked at, but this is the sensory work we did, and it kind of backs up the analytical work. So with the senory work, we took our panelists, our 11 people and we went through our beers and we came up with our descriptors as we smelled through and tasted through all these beers we came up with descriptors of what kind of the general group of beers had in common that they smelled like, and we had wonderful things like horsey barnyard, so anybody who is into beer or wine would recognize this was breaomaisis, which is a microorganism that winemakers hate because it gets into their barrels and takes over and starts making this kind of horsey, blanket kind of barnyard smelling wine. Wine makers hate it, but brewers in the United States love it. Some of these brewers that brew sour beers are all about this kind of horsey, barnyard thing. Artificial grape. This is the grape bubble gum kind of smell. You guys all kind of know what I'm talking about when I say artificial grape. When i was a kid it used to come in these big long sticks. Artificial Grape flavor and aroma. Afilacitate, which is nail polish remover, vinegar, dusty or earthy-like, coco, coffee, carmel, and when I say these words it kind of elicits an image in your head of what that smells like or what that might taste like. Okay, briny like olive brine, or stale and moldy, salty, bitter, sweet, astringent, sour. This is how we compared these beers, these 13 beers in the sensory panel, and just to kind of highlight the American sour beers, these are these descriptors we kind of used to describe the American sour beers: horsey barbary, nail polish remover, vinegar, dusty, briny, moldy, salty, bitter, astringent, sour, so you see how the American beers were perceived as quite a bit more sour, more astringent, more sour, more salty, more stale, moldy, briny, dusty, earthy. Again, I think it's kind of a character the American brewers are looking for, but when you compare them to the Belgian beers you get this Artificial Grape, Cocoa, Carmel and sweet. As we're going through the Belgian beers, they tended to be less sour and a lot sweeter, lower in alcohol, not very bitter and just very mellow, easy to drink sour beers, and they all grouped really closely together. So the next slide I have is just another way to look at that data, it's more spacial. And what we like to do is put that into this principal component analysis. What it does is group samples together that share common descriptors, basically, so if you look at these beers here, A1, 6, 2, they're all the same color along with B5 here, but these are the samples that kind of correlate and respond to those descriptors over here, and these over here with the Bs came over here with the sweet, coco, coffee, carmel, so the Bs stand for Belgian and the A stands for American, And then we come out here with these two crazy little guys. These are the beers I told you about that people didn't like, so if you like the artificial grape, it's really driving where these guys are. It's really driving these Belgian beers. So again, just another way of looking at that data. So what we found is the Belgian beers clustered tightly in sensory and in analytic of instrumental analysis we did. And the US beers had more variety within the group, which kind of figures because when you look at the them geographically, those Belgian breweries are all really close together, and the US breweries are spread all across the United States. They're being made in the East coast, the West coast, in the Midwest, and 14 of the 22 sensory attributes we looked at showed a significant difference within the groups. So that manes that 14 of the 22, but 8 of the 22 actually had similarities between them. We couldn't tell a difference between the beers. The Belgian beers were described as cocoa, coffee, carmel, cherry, dark fruit and artificial grape. And the US beers showed a greater bitterness, sourness, astringency, salty and were described as fruity with bredamyasis type flavors. That horsey, barney type flavor. So, where does that take us? This is Block 15 if you guys have ever been to Block 15. Well, it's Block 15 and Le Caves. Downstairs, you see their fermentation rooms and the kitchen, and then if you go back and wander back and wander back further until you get underneath Le Caves, they have a barrel room where they're doing sour beers and their aging sour beers. Some of the beers that go up to Le Caves are coming out of these barrels, and quite a few of the breweries in the Northwest are starting their own sour beer programs. It's a little dangerous because you're introducing microorganisms that you typically don't want in your brewery in your brewery. And you got to keep them under control so they don't get into the rest of your beer, because these are breweries that are making other beer that they don't want to be sour. It's a little bit of a difficult situation, it's like holding a gun to your head having this. But they have a barrel room. And this is here at OSU, this is a picture of our open fermenter. This is an old milk sanitation tank, which we use for doing English ales, but recently we opened it up to sour beer, to make our own Flanders style beer, and we have an open ferment here with some English Yeast and some French Malt and some lacabacilis mixed in to try to sour it. And then we'll pump that into wine barrels. This is a red wine barrel and white wine barrel and let those age in the back room. And there he is again, our beer is called Stupid Sexy Flanders. That's the beer we're working on here, if anybody remembers that Simpsons episode, it was quite hilarious. So I tried to keep this kind of short and keep the science kind of there because it is a science pub, but not too deep. And hopefully left a lot of time for questions, and it's open to anything you guys want to know about. I run the research brewery and work in the program. I've been doing this since 1993, and I've been doing sensory work since 1993, so I should be able to answer any question you guys might have, if I can't, I'm always open to saying, 'I don't know the answer to that.'