How many ways to pasteurize craft beer?

How many ways to pasteurize craft beer?

Friends may be curious, in what way is pasteurization applied in the craft beer industry? Today we are going to talk about this topic.

There are two pasteurization methods for craft beer: one is instantaneous sterilization, and the other is sterilization after beer bottling – tunnel spray sterilization.

It doesn’t matter if you are new to the beer-making business and just have a plan to brew your own beer at home, or have been a craft brewer and have gained some experience in this seemingly endless process. You must know the process of pasteurization before starting any brewing processes. Before we get into more details, let’s first define what is pasteurization?

1. Instantaneous sterilization

Instantaneous sterilization is a method of rapidly sterilizing wine before bottling, also known as high-temperature short-time sterilization. Typically, beer is heated and cooled by a set of plate heat exchangers. During instantaneous sterilization, the beer is rapidly heated to 68-72°C in a plate heat exchanger, the holding time is about 50-30 seconds, and then it is rapidly cooled to the initial temperature.

Instant kill sterilization has higher requirements on the hygienic state and filling technology of beer bottles, that is, aseptic filling is required, which is difficult for many small beer enterprises to achieve.

2. Sterilization after beer bottling – tunnel spray sterilization

Tunnel spray sterilization is one of the most widely used pasteurization methods at home and abroad. It is a tunnel sterilizer composed of several boxes. The body is divided into several different temperature spray areas; bottled wine enters the sterilizer continuously, and goes through different temperature areas, preheating, heat preservation, sterilization, and cooling to achieve predetermined sterilization. After the effect, the sterilizer is continuously output.

Different from the instantaneous sterilization, the tunnel spray sterilizer sterilizes the beer together with the packaged packaging container (glass bottle); that is, the glass bottle and the contained beer are heated to the required sterilization temperature together, and are kept at this temperature for a period of time. time, and then cooled to room temperature together.

Obviously, the reliability of this sterilization method is very high. Therefore, the tunnel spray sterilization method is the first choice for beer manufacturers in China and Europe and the United States.

The sterilization process of the tunnel spray sterilizer generally takes about 45~60min. It is also the largest equipment in the entire filling production line; the average production capacity is 1000 bottles/hr, and the area is as high as 3~3.5m2.

During the operation, the heating and cooling stages of the bottled wine should not be too violent, and can be divided into three stages: 4-30°C, 35-50°C, and 55-62°C.