Beer Freshness Control

At last 20 years, Chinese Beer volume keep a high increasing rate. Since 2002 China was as the biggest beer production and sale Marketing in Worldwide. But Chinese consumers also start to be aware of the importance of Fresh taste beer. Beer drinkability and beer freshness can bring Brand Competitive Advantage. More and more beer makers pushed out their "Draft Beer" or "Light Beer" to get more marketing share. The freshness means no or less oxidation or staling for beer. The beer oxidation will reduce beer freshness and drinkability, special to light beer. We used process observations and comparing taste by BrewMaster team to find out a Freshness worklist.Fresh beer is more drinkable. Full, crisp, slight sweet and clean beer can be flavored by more consumers. On the opposite condition, people will not like the staling, lingering bitter, harsh and papery beer if the beer could not be treated well (with more high temperature heating & long-term storage) in production, storage and shipping.Currently more Chinese breweries started to pay attention to freshness control. Some breweries purchased and installed the filling machine from KHS & Krones. The machine set up the latest technology with 2-times-vaccum to eliminate air in bottles and control package total oxygen. Other breweries upgraded their equipments in brewhouse and beer filtration to control beer freshness.Our work focused on the factors related to beer freshness and production process observation and improvement.Dissolved oxygen control: More oxidation will be with more staling. High DO will follow more oxidation. To beer production process from raw material to packaging, we focused on critical process control points' observation and improvement. And we also worked out a work list for Breweries use.SO₂ concentration control: Sulfary may produce some bad odor, like burst match and grainy. We took related comparison to beer taste with different concentration SO₂. And we also showed a good way to reduce SO₂ in beer.Temperature control in pasteurizer and storage & shipping: High temperature can result in oxidation rapidly. We focused on the process observation and worked out a control spec for pasteurization and beer storage and shipping.Through the research work of beer freshness topic, we made out the critical process control point specifications which include brewing material, brewhouse, fermentation, filtration, packaging, warehouse and shipping process. Anheuser Busch Wuhan brewery spent almost 2 years to achieve this standard which done great help to improve beer freshness, quality, and company competition in the China market.