Production of fermented malt beverages

Food or edible material: processes – compositions – and products – Fermentation processes – Alcoholic beverage production or treatment to result in...

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4263304, 426490, 426495, C12H 100

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active

058691146

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BRIEF SUMMARY
This application is the national stage of PCT International Application No. PCT/CA94/00171, filed on Mar. 18, 1994, which claims priority to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/035,805 filed on Mar. 23, 1993, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,304,384.


TECHNICAL FIELD

The present invention relates to rapid, continuous, highly uniform, chill processing of alcoholic beverages at or near their freezing points, without any substantial collateral freeze-concentration thereof; and especially in connection with the production, by way of example, of fermented alcoholic beverages such as wine, and cider, but especially of fermented malt beverages such as beer, and low-alcohol and non-alcoholic products derived therefrom.


BACKGROUND OF ART

Many such beverages can benefit from or even require chilling in order to preserve or achieve some beneficial attribute. This is especially the case, given the extreme ability of humans to discern even trace amounts of volatile and flavour components, as well as cloudiness or "haze" that forms in some such beverages. Wine beverages for example, can benefit, and specifically so in cases which require remedial processing to deal with, say, excess tartrate concentrations.
Brewery beverages, or fermented malt brewery beverages in particular, are of particular interest because of the special benefits to be accrued by way of "chilling". The general process of preparing fermented malt beverages, such as beer, ale, porter, malt liquor, low and non-alcoholic derivatives thereof, and other similar fermented alcoholic brewery beverages, hereinafter referred to simply as "beer" for convenience, is well known. As practiced in modern breweries, the process comprises, briefly, preparing a "mash" of malt, usually with cereal adjuncts, and heating the mash to solubilize the proteins and convert the starch into sugar and dextrins. The insoluble grains are filtered off and washed with hot water which is combined with the soluble material and the resulting wort boiled in a brew kettle to inactivate enzymes, sterilize the wort, extract desired hop components from added hops, and coagulate certain protein-like substances. The wort is then strained to remove spent hops and coagulate, cooled and pitched with yeast, and then fermented. The fermented brew known as "green" or "ruh" beer is then "finished", aged--which is sometimes referred to as "lagering" and clarified, filtered, and then carbonated) to produce the desired beer.
A variation on the basic process which is now well recognized is termed "high gravity brewing" in which procedure the green beer is produced at an elevated alcohol content (say for example from 7 to 8% v/v, and this is then diluted to the alcohol content desired in the finished beer (eg. 5% v/v for a "regular beer").
As is well known, beers in general develop a haze over time and/or through changes in temperature of the beer. This haze is considered to be made up of two types: temperature of the beer is raised to, say, room temperature; and
Of course, if a beer is consumed warm, as is customary in some European countries, then chill haze may not be as serious a problem for the brewer and consumer as it otherwise would be for beers that are customarily consumed cold, (as is typically the case for North American beers, for example).
In any event, the problem of chill haze manifestation has been exacerbated by industry trends that have resulted in an increase in the amount of time that normally elapses between when the beer is finished, and when it is finally consumed by the public. As a consequence the haze has a greater opportunity to develope to a problematic and often unacceptable degree.
The exact nature and mode of formation of haze in beer is still uncertain but it is generally accepted that haze comprises significant amounts of proteins, yeast cells, metals, cell components, polyphenols and various other materials.
The problem of haze formation has been addressed in many ways over many years. The traditional way, of course, is to subject the beverage to a conventional "lagering" step o

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