The other day I was talking while I had a few beers with a more experienced brewer and also own’s a bar of imported beers. I told him I had already bought my wort chiller and how important to get better and easy my process and mentioned the word “pasteurization” while I meant the process of cooling the wort. And he said he had nothing to do with it. To which I argued that that means that a beer is pasteurized to kill any yeast in the bottle and filter to last longer. Well, the fact is that we raise the tone a bit and everyone put their point to debate with other guys there
Is the process of boiling the wort and cooling faster should be consider pasteurization?
It’s a form of pasteurization, sure, but the reality is that you’re immediately countermanding it with yeast pitches.
In truth, when most people think pasteurization what they mean is the rapid heating and cooling of a packaged product (or soon to be packaged product - e.g. ice cream mix). Beers can be bottled, canned, etc and then flash pasteurized and rapidly cooled for shelf stability and contamination control.
and the cooling doesn’t really have anything to do with the pasteurization. that is simply an attempt to maintain the quality of the product and minimize the effects of heating. It’s the heating that pasteurizes.
Flash pasteurization implies rapid heating and cooling like Drew said, but pasteurization itself does not.
It can be cooled slow or fast or not cooled at all. Pasteurization is just the heating of something to a certain temperature for a certain time in order to kill microorganisms.
I’ll figured that to when considering a part of pasteurization too, becouse taking the wort to high heat is of course the real thing, and obviously when i think in Pasteur himself making his experiments of heating and keeping the germs out of it in his old laboratory out of technology.
From Wikipedia:
Pasteurization is a process of heating a food, usually liquid, to a specific temperature for a definite length of time, and then cooling it immediately. This process slows microbial growth in food. The process of heating wine for preservation purposes has been known in China since 1117,[1] and is documented in Japan in 1568 in the diary Tamonin-nikki, but the modern version was created by the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, after whom it is named. The first pasteurization test was completed by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard in April 1862.[2] The process was originally conceived as a way of preventing wine and beer from souring.[3]
Unlike sterilization, pasteurization is not intended to kill all micro-organisms in the food. Instead pasteurization aims to reduce the number of viable pathogens so they are unlikely to cause disease (assuming the pasteurized product is stored as indicated and consumed before its expiration date). Commercial-scale sterilization of food is not common because it adversely affects the taste and quality of the product. Certain food products, like dairy products, are superheated to ensure pathogenic microbes are destroyed.[4]
: Not surprisingly, wikipedia is wrong. Cooling immediately is not a part of pasteurization. Hotpack foods are not immediately cooled, it would be bad for the glass.
Sure it is, you cool it immediately after heating. I don’t think that means you have to cool it rapidly. But once you stop heating, of course it immediately starts to cool.
By the way, I added too much priming sugar to a stout once and I got around it by pasteurizing the bottled beer at 160F for about ten minutes. I was worried they would pop the whole time but everything went well.
;D That’s a pretty weak semantic argument. “cooling it immediately” implies rapidly or at least actively.
But pasteurization is time/temp. Once you pass the time at the temp you are no longer pasteurizing, you are just holding temp. <---- another weak semantic argument
By boiling the wort has the advantage of pasteurizing so you can determine the type of yeast to use. I know, it has other purposes too; hot & cold break, hop utilization etc…
Mash temps held at usual times will probably kill most yeast but not other bugs.
I don’t know what I’m talking about. Just commenting to make it easier to follow the thread
You’re right, once you get to the critical temperature and hold for the required time, you aren’t pasteurizing anymore but you do need to cool quickly so you don’t effect the flavor. This is very important in eggs.
More important for some things than others is all I’m saying. Eggs, milk, other things, yes, they are chilled quickly to stabilize the flavor. Hot pack foods and pasteurized water don’t need to be. But they are still pasteurized.
The beauty of pasteurization is that lower temps will work if you use longer times. Sometimes a high temp will damage food irreversibly, where the longer time at lower temp won’t. And rapid cooling can help to minimize the potential damage being done by cooking.
Beat that dead horze some more! Can we get 500 posts on pasteurization? Is it safe to pasteurize with no pants?