Yeast
from West Fine Art of Beer Brewing
Virgin,
never touched by hand, it bubbled over and lasted over 260 seconds. “It’s one
of the tests of good beer, how long the head stays,” says Henk Breederveld,
quality and technology manager, United Breweries. On the table is the world’s
second-largest beer brand (it is manufactured in UB’s Taloja plant) showing off
its stuff. And right now, it seems only right that James Bond has switched
loyalties from martinis to Heineken in the upcoming movie, Skyfall. The lager
may have lost its fizz, but tastes deliciously fresh, a little fruity, a little
bitter. “Europeans don’t like their beer as sweet as the beers produced here,”
explains Breederveld during the beer tasting. “I don’t remember, it’s that
long”, he says when asked how long he has been with Heineken. He has travelled
the world, setting up Heineken breweries in other countries as well. Since
2010, his destination has been India.
But no matter where it goes, Heineken doesn’t change its recipe for the local palate. Everywhere it retains its Dutch heart, and for that, key ingredients are imported from the Netherlands and other European countries.
These include the malt, hops and yeast. The milled bits of semi-germinated dried grain, malt are crunchy and almost tasteless. Break one open and you see potential beer inside — that is, if you know the science — the white starch that will convert into fermentable sugars and then into alcohol.
The barley grains for Taloja are malted in France and Germany. They arrive in gunny bags and all three types — fine flour, coarse grist and husk — are pushed straight into the mashtuns, huge, lidded stainless steel vessels, hot to touch as the malt and brew water are heated inside to activate enzymes that trigger the starch break down into fermentable sugars. Here onwards, the beer is never touched by hand. It travels from one spot to another in pipes, cleaned every morning by a ballast of caustic soda solution to remove all organic residue. The cleanliness is measured by ‘grit level’, in layman terms, by how much the pipes shine inside.
Outside, the view is a tad disappointing. Especially if you were hoping to gaze in awe at the golden gurgling liquid, imagining the infusion of flavours and scrunching up your nose at the odour of fermentation. All the action happens in lidded vessels and pipes built by equipment manufacturers based in Pune and Germany. You don’t hear or smell anything as you walk into the factory floor. In fact, it isn’t much of a factory floor — straight down are the offices and conference room and there, points Breederveld, is the mashtun where the starch metamorphosis begins.
Worts And All
Right next to it squats an equally huge steel vessel called the lautertun. This is the first stop for the brew water and malt mix. It’s the filtration site that separates spent grain from the malt extract. Barley shells line up the bottom forming a natural sieve as the mix is pumped in. The sediment layer eventually becomes so thick, it has to be raked out by steel arms built inside the vessel.
The run-off from the lautertun is called sweet wort — at this stage the liquid has shed its pulpiness to turn thinner, just what you get when you pop a bottle. Or perhaps not. There is more filtration to go before we reach there. “Beer making is alternating between two processes: adding and processing the ingredients, and cleaning. As we add, we clean. For instance, cleaning of the malt before use and filtering the beer during filtration.
That really impacts the final flavours,” explains Breederveld.
Filtration stage two occurs in the wort copper where the liquid is boiled again. The target impurities? Proteins, wild yeast and possible bacteria. Proteins generated in the mashtun are done with their task: breaking down starch. Now they are taste saboteurs and must be thrown out. The heat clumps together soluble proteins, a process called flocculation, for easy filtration. Alongside it sterilises the wort, increasing shelf life and enhancing taste.
Just before boiling point is reached, the final flavour generators, hops, are bunged in. These flower clusters contain lupulin: the real bittering agent of beers. Heineken uses hops from Germany, the Czech Republic and the US. The hops are pressed into pellets or liquefied. By themselves, their bitterness is off putting... inside the beer, though is another story.
“Brewing beer is highly sophisticated. It’s a delicate business because we are dealing with living things inside. We need to control the environment completely and that comes only from precision in procedures and absolute cleanliness,” says Yogesh Malhotra, plant manager, Taloja Brewery.
Heads Up
This is why, even though there is no shiny clang-bang equipment in Taloja, you can’t miss the web of computers tracking every stage of beer making. Temperature to texture, protein to pH, everything is continuously monitored. A state-ofthe-art laboratory is linked to the beer lines for live testing of sterility, haze levels, microbiology analysis and so on.
Taloja employs over 100 workmen. There aren’t many about, except for technicians in lab coats. This is a quiet factory. Kingfisher didn’t need to beef up manpower for Heineken as the monthly production target is not high, requiring only two- to three-day-long bottling slots. That’s not much for a brewery that churns out lakhs of Kingfisher bottles and cans every month. Is this why Heineken chose Taloja among all other breweries in the country?
“They were technologically up to date here and the manufacturing practices were consistent with our philosophies and standards. We didn’t have to invest much in infrastructure either, except for the laboratory and packaging — we use signature embossed bottles and plastic labels,” says Breederveld. World over, beer brewing processes are standard, stout to stout and ale to ale. The science is the same, limiting innovation. And why mess with a drink that comes with its own patron saint — King Gambrinus of Flanders?
But economics trumps myths. If you don’t tweak the recipe or tinker with processes, how will the customer distinguish, say, a Budweiser from a Heineken? So every company owns a unique formula for its beer: Bud uses rice grains, Kingfisher adds adjuncts and Heineken is known prefer the classic Pilsner recipe for its flagship lager
Yeasty Magic
Suffused with bitterness, the “hopped wort” needs to be cleaned again, this time to remove the leaves. The process is as intuitive as stirring your morning cuppa, still steeped with tea leaves: stir it so hard that the leaves whirl towards the centre and can be drained out. From this whirlpool, the beer is ready for the biggest change in its character: fermentation.
Nothing ferments at 95° Celsius. The hopped wort is cooled to 7.5° C in a plate exchanger where hot wort flows alongside cold brew water at 2° C in the opposite direction. The two literally “exchange temperatures”. Next, the liquid is prepared to become a yeast habitat: sterile air is added to the wort to facilitate growth. Then goes in the precious, oneof-a-kind, Heineken A-yeast.
“In 1886, Heineken appointed a student of Louis Pasteur to select a yeast strain for the beer. What he chose is called the Heineken-A yeast. All our breweries across the world use this yeast from our culture plant in Zoeterwoude, the Netherlands,” says Breederveld.
This is perhaps the most sensitive part of the brewing, for as Malhotra pointed out, all things living must be closely watched. The right temperature, duration, quantity and mixing technique come together for a fission of flavour during the yeast harvest. The yeast breaks down the malt sugars to alcohol, CO 2 and other components. Now’s when the beer gets its kick.
Seven days later, when about 75% sugars have converted, what emerges is green beer: still raw in taste, not balanced by the right alcohol or CO 2 content. By this time the yeast, which has reproduced madly, nearly quintupling in quantity, sinks down and is drained off the ingenuously shaped cone-bottomed tanks. Typically, a single yeast batch lasts four fermentations before it loses its beer-making potency.
Another 4-6 weeks are needed for the beer to mature in deep cellars. The magical transformation occurs below freezing point: at -1° C. By this time 90% fermentable sugars turn into alcohol, the rest remain to add their sweetness to the beer.
Taste-wise, Heineken is now ready. But only if you intend to swill beer from stone jars. In glass bottles, the clarity of beer is noticeable so it must go through a final filtration process to remove residual protein cells and dysfunctional yeast. Till it is finally packaged, this beer is stored in bright beer tanks (BBT). And it is only when you gaze up at the mammoth multi-floor tanks, that you realise exactly how much beer is swirling around you.
Dressing Up
The multi-storey BBTs can store
beer equivalent to 1.5 million
cases. That’s the capacity of each BBT. But the beer inside is no longer under Heineken or Kingfisher’s supervision alone. The excise department rules the roost hereon, monitoring and recording beer production. Every drop is accounted for and bottles tallied with batch volumes.
“Here it is going to feel like a factory,” says Breederveld as we head to the bottling department on the other side of a flight of stairs. As some sunlight sparkles in through an open door, you realise the brew house has no windows. So is it true? Does sunlight affect the taste of beer? “If exposed for longer durations, then yes it can,” confirms Breederveld.
The stairs open up into a hall so huge, you can’t see it end to end. It takes a little getting used to, the brew house is comparatively cosy. And then you spot it: the line of Heineken bottles clattering forward towards and beyond the filling carousel. The tour finally culminates into the most glamourous part yet: the assembly line. First, the special embossed, green bottles go through an array of intense cleansing and sterilisation. They are photographed from various angles for inspection and if everything’s okay, they move forward on steel tracks to the filling carousel. Here, bright beer is waiting, channelled straight from the BBT. The brewery’s hybrid layout is designed for continuous flow: again, no human intervention is required.
On the carousel, some textbook physics principles are on display. The bottler machines don’t depend on gravity to do the trick. They create a vacuum and suck out all air from the bottles. Next the CO 2 flows in due to the difference in pressure. Just as the CO 2 level inside the bottles matches up to the fillers, the beer valves open and the pale golden liquid silently flows in, hugging the inner walls of the bottles.
“This prevents air pick-up as much as possible. What you see is not just packing, we are still preserving taste and flavours,” explains Breederveld. It doesn’t stop at the beer filling. Just before the crown corks are put on, the bottles are topped with brew water till they overflow. The idea is to leave no space for oxygen that messes with beer taste.
Finally, the bottles are pasteurised, that is heated to 62° C to make the beer more stable. The packaging equipment imported from Slovakia is fully automatic. The beer bottles stack themselves up in cartons from where workmen wheel them to the pallets stacked in the bonded warehouse.
In this clockwork journey, is there never a misstep? Does every batch of beer turn out the same? “No. You can be as careful as you want, monitor every stage, but you can’t get exactly the same result always. This is an agricultural product. The harvest of barley to the kind of hops affects the final taste. You sometimes have to balance flavours to make sure Heineken lovers are not disappointed,” says Breederveld.
Far from that. At the small tasting room, the beer’s peaked. Heineken’s story may be over. But the party at the brew house had just started.
But no matter where it goes, Heineken doesn’t change its recipe for the local palate. Everywhere it retains its Dutch heart, and for that, key ingredients are imported from the Netherlands and other European countries.
These include the malt, hops and yeast. The milled bits of semi-germinated dried grain, malt are crunchy and almost tasteless. Break one open and you see potential beer inside — that is, if you know the science — the white starch that will convert into fermentable sugars and then into alcohol.
The barley grains for Taloja are malted in France and Germany. They arrive in gunny bags and all three types — fine flour, coarse grist and husk — are pushed straight into the mashtuns, huge, lidded stainless steel vessels, hot to touch as the malt and brew water are heated inside to activate enzymes that trigger the starch break down into fermentable sugars. Here onwards, the beer is never touched by hand. It travels from one spot to another in pipes, cleaned every morning by a ballast of caustic soda solution to remove all organic residue. The cleanliness is measured by ‘grit level’, in layman terms, by how much the pipes shine inside.
Outside, the view is a tad disappointing. Especially if you were hoping to gaze in awe at the golden gurgling liquid, imagining the infusion of flavours and scrunching up your nose at the odour of fermentation. All the action happens in lidded vessels and pipes built by equipment manufacturers based in Pune and Germany. You don’t hear or smell anything as you walk into the factory floor. In fact, it isn’t much of a factory floor — straight down are the offices and conference room and there, points Breederveld, is the mashtun where the starch metamorphosis begins.
Worts And All
Right next to it squats an equally huge steel vessel called the lautertun. This is the first stop for the brew water and malt mix. It’s the filtration site that separates spent grain from the malt extract. Barley shells line up the bottom forming a natural sieve as the mix is pumped in. The sediment layer eventually becomes so thick, it has to be raked out by steel arms built inside the vessel.
The run-off from the lautertun is called sweet wort — at this stage the liquid has shed its pulpiness to turn thinner, just what you get when you pop a bottle. Or perhaps not. There is more filtration to go before we reach there. “Beer making is alternating between two processes: adding and processing the ingredients, and cleaning. As we add, we clean. For instance, cleaning of the malt before use and filtering the beer during filtration.
That really impacts the final flavours,” explains Breederveld.
Filtration stage two occurs in the wort copper where the liquid is boiled again. The target impurities? Proteins, wild yeast and possible bacteria. Proteins generated in the mashtun are done with their task: breaking down starch. Now they are taste saboteurs and must be thrown out. The heat clumps together soluble proteins, a process called flocculation, for easy filtration. Alongside it sterilises the wort, increasing shelf life and enhancing taste.
Just before boiling point is reached, the final flavour generators, hops, are bunged in. These flower clusters contain lupulin: the real bittering agent of beers. Heineken uses hops from Germany, the Czech Republic and the US. The hops are pressed into pellets or liquefied. By themselves, their bitterness is off putting... inside the beer, though is another story.
“Brewing beer is highly sophisticated. It’s a delicate business because we are dealing with living things inside. We need to control the environment completely and that comes only from precision in procedures and absolute cleanliness,” says Yogesh Malhotra, plant manager, Taloja Brewery.
Heads Up
This is why, even though there is no shiny clang-bang equipment in Taloja, you can’t miss the web of computers tracking every stage of beer making. Temperature to texture, protein to pH, everything is continuously monitored. A state-ofthe-art laboratory is linked to the beer lines for live testing of sterility, haze levels, microbiology analysis and so on.
Taloja employs over 100 workmen. There aren’t many about, except for technicians in lab coats. This is a quiet factory. Kingfisher didn’t need to beef up manpower for Heineken as the monthly production target is not high, requiring only two- to three-day-long bottling slots. That’s not much for a brewery that churns out lakhs of Kingfisher bottles and cans every month. Is this why Heineken chose Taloja among all other breweries in the country?
“They were technologically up to date here and the manufacturing practices were consistent with our philosophies and standards. We didn’t have to invest much in infrastructure either, except for the laboratory and packaging — we use signature embossed bottles and plastic labels,” says Breederveld. World over, beer brewing processes are standard, stout to stout and ale to ale. The science is the same, limiting innovation. And why mess with a drink that comes with its own patron saint — King Gambrinus of Flanders?
But economics trumps myths. If you don’t tweak the recipe or tinker with processes, how will the customer distinguish, say, a Budweiser from a Heineken? So every company owns a unique formula for its beer: Bud uses rice grains, Kingfisher adds adjuncts and Heineken is known prefer the classic Pilsner recipe for its flagship lager
Yeasty Magic
Suffused with bitterness, the “hopped wort” needs to be cleaned again, this time to remove the leaves. The process is as intuitive as stirring your morning cuppa, still steeped with tea leaves: stir it so hard that the leaves whirl towards the centre and can be drained out. From this whirlpool, the beer is ready for the biggest change in its character: fermentation.
Nothing ferments at 95° Celsius. The hopped wort is cooled to 7.5° C in a plate exchanger where hot wort flows alongside cold brew water at 2° C in the opposite direction. The two literally “exchange temperatures”. Next, the liquid is prepared to become a yeast habitat: sterile air is added to the wort to facilitate growth. Then goes in the precious, oneof-a-kind, Heineken A-yeast.
“In 1886, Heineken appointed a student of Louis Pasteur to select a yeast strain for the beer. What he chose is called the Heineken-A yeast. All our breweries across the world use this yeast from our culture plant in Zoeterwoude, the Netherlands,” says Breederveld.
This is perhaps the most sensitive part of the brewing, for as Malhotra pointed out, all things living must be closely watched. The right temperature, duration, quantity and mixing technique come together for a fission of flavour during the yeast harvest. The yeast breaks down the malt sugars to alcohol, CO 2 and other components. Now’s when the beer gets its kick.
Seven days later, when about 75% sugars have converted, what emerges is green beer: still raw in taste, not balanced by the right alcohol or CO 2 content. By this time the yeast, which has reproduced madly, nearly quintupling in quantity, sinks down and is drained off the ingenuously shaped cone-bottomed tanks. Typically, a single yeast batch lasts four fermentations before it loses its beer-making potency.
Another 4-6 weeks are needed for the beer to mature in deep cellars. The magical transformation occurs below freezing point: at -1° C. By this time 90% fermentable sugars turn into alcohol, the rest remain to add their sweetness to the beer.
Taste-wise, Heineken is now ready. But only if you intend to swill beer from stone jars. In glass bottles, the clarity of beer is noticeable so it must go through a final filtration process to remove residual protein cells and dysfunctional yeast. Till it is finally packaged, this beer is stored in bright beer tanks (BBT). And it is only when you gaze up at the mammoth multi-floor tanks, that you realise exactly how much beer is swirling around you.
Dressing Up
The multi-storey BBTs can store
beer equivalent to 1.5 million
cases. That’s the capacity of each BBT. But the beer inside is no longer under Heineken or Kingfisher’s supervision alone. The excise department rules the roost hereon, monitoring and recording beer production. Every drop is accounted for and bottles tallied with batch volumes.
“Here it is going to feel like a factory,” says Breederveld as we head to the bottling department on the other side of a flight of stairs. As some sunlight sparkles in through an open door, you realise the brew house has no windows. So is it true? Does sunlight affect the taste of beer? “If exposed for longer durations, then yes it can,” confirms Breederveld.
The stairs open up into a hall so huge, you can’t see it end to end. It takes a little getting used to, the brew house is comparatively cosy. And then you spot it: the line of Heineken bottles clattering forward towards and beyond the filling carousel. The tour finally culminates into the most glamourous part yet: the assembly line. First, the special embossed, green bottles go through an array of intense cleansing and sterilisation. They are photographed from various angles for inspection and if everything’s okay, they move forward on steel tracks to the filling carousel. Here, bright beer is waiting, channelled straight from the BBT. The brewery’s hybrid layout is designed for continuous flow: again, no human intervention is required.
On the carousel, some textbook physics principles are on display. The bottler machines don’t depend on gravity to do the trick. They create a vacuum and suck out all air from the bottles. Next the CO 2 flows in due to the difference in pressure. Just as the CO 2 level inside the bottles matches up to the fillers, the beer valves open and the pale golden liquid silently flows in, hugging the inner walls of the bottles.
“This prevents air pick-up as much as possible. What you see is not just packing, we are still preserving taste and flavours,” explains Breederveld. It doesn’t stop at the beer filling. Just before the crown corks are put on, the bottles are topped with brew water till they overflow. The idea is to leave no space for oxygen that messes with beer taste.
Finally, the bottles are pasteurised, that is heated to 62° C to make the beer more stable. The packaging equipment imported from Slovakia is fully automatic. The beer bottles stack themselves up in cartons from where workmen wheel them to the pallets stacked in the bonded warehouse.
In this clockwork journey, is there never a misstep? Does every batch of beer turn out the same? “No. You can be as careful as you want, monitor every stage, but you can’t get exactly the same result always. This is an agricultural product. The harvest of barley to the kind of hops affects the final taste. You sometimes have to balance flavours to make sure Heineken lovers are not disappointed,” says Breederveld.
Far from that. At the small tasting room, the beer’s peaked. Heineken’s story may be over. But the party at the brew house had just started.
Kamya
Jaiswal 120819
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