Keep the flavor, hold the alcohol
10 Jan 2024
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English
- EMEA, Americas & APAC
- China
- Latin America
For breweries across the world, sustainable brewing practices can range from reducing energy usage to making beer with innovative raw materials that help support local economies. DSM Brewmaster Siaw Yon Miaw works in the dynamic Asia Pacific region, and I asked him how he’s seeing these trends take shape …
A Master Brewer with over 30 years of experience, Siaw works closely with brewers in Asia-Pacific to develop delicious and sustainably-produced beers. He’s been with DSM for ten years and earned his Master Brewer qualifications from the Institute for Brewing and Distilling (IBD).
Siaw Yon Miaw: The Asia Pacific market is quite varied and the demand for beer is closely tied to the economic development in each specific country. For more developed Asian countries such as Japan, Singapore and Korea, as well as big cities such as Shanghai, Peking, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangkok, for example, craft beer is starting to flourish, and there’s a lot of experimentation with different flavor styles such as highly bitter beers, fruit beers, and coffee and spice flavors. In places such as Vietnam, Myanmar and Laos, there’s demand for simple and less expensive local beers. Religious and family restrictions can also impact demand. Across the region, there’s a lot of interest in brewing with locally produced raw materials (adjuncts) such as rice, cassava, sorghum and corn to reduce the cost of production, so as to maintain the price of beer at an affordable level.
Siaw Yon Miaw: Well we know that beer, in its purest form, is traditionally made with malt. But in Asia, brewers are experimenting with different raw materials, often out of necessity. For example, in Papua New Guinea – farmers there planted an excess of cassava, and brewers started buying it in an effort to not only reduce their production cost and be more sustainable in their production process, but also to support the local economy. DSM worked with a brewer there to develop a recipe for 100% cassava beer with the help of DSM enzymes, and so far it’s very successful.
Siaw Yon Miaw: Enzymes make it possible for brewers to use other raw materials (adjunct) besides malt to make beer, and as I mentioned earlier, using alternatives like rice and cassava can significantly reduce production costs. Another benefit of using enzymes is flexibility; it’s easy to change the recipe and processes depending on the brewer’s needs, and therefore it’s easy to experiment and develop new product concepts. Our Brewers Compass® is a cocktail enzyme solution that helps brewers increase the proportion of adjunct used in their beer and find the right balance while reducing reliance on costly, energy-intensive malt.
Siaw Yon Miaw: Enzymes make it possible for brewers to use other raw materials (adjunct) besides malt to make beer, and as I mentioned earlier, using alternatives like rice and cassava can significantly reduce production costs. Another benefit of using enzymes is flexibility; it’s easy to change the recipe and processes depending on the brewer’s needs, and therefore it’s easy to experiment and develop new product concepts. Our Brewers Compass® is a cocktail enzyme solution that helps brewers increase the proportion of adjunct used in their beer and find the right balance while reducing reliance on costly, energy-intensive malt.
Siaw Yon Miaw: Sustainability encompasses many areas/disciplines for brewers – from production processes and raw materials to waste generation/disposal and energy consumption. Brewers Clarex® is one of the most sustainable enzyme solutions that we’ve introduced, and customers in my region have been using it with great success.
At the end of the day, brewers (and beer drinkers!) want a golden color, sparkling clear glass of beer – regardless of the materials used to make it - and that requires a haze stabilization process. The most common traditional stabilization method uses powder stabilizers (such as PVPP, Silica gel) that are based on the ‘absorption’ principle, which is only effective at a very low temperature (below 0C).
Keeping beer below sub-zero temperatures for several days is commonly referred to as ‘Cold Maturation’ and is an extremely energy consumptive and costly process. Subsequently, the stabilizer powder suspended in the beer needs to be removed during beer filtration, and this waste has to be specially treated before disposal – another costly step.
Brewers Clarex® is a proline-specific endoprotease enzyme in liquid form that dramatically simplifies the stabilization process. It hydrolyzes the haze forming sensitive protein enzymatically and enables brewers to skip or minimize and raise the temperature of the Cold Maturation step from sub-zero to +2 or +4C. Subsequently, the beer filtration temperature can also be raised from sub-zero to +2 or +4C, which means further reduced cooling energy consumption. Secondly, since Brewers Clarex® is a liquid stabilizer, there is no solid waste byproduct to dispose of afterward.
Many larger breweries are seamlessly adopting Brewers Clarex® because of its positive impact on their cooling energy saving and sustainability targets. In fact, a global brewer is using it in 90% of their breweries here in Asia Pacific.
A diverse collection of various beer recipes from across the globe, featuring DSMs regional Brewmasters.
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20 May 2020
10 Jan 2024
