I am not a Luddite, and I have no strong views on sticking to traditional methods when brewing or serving beers. Sure, I know the difference between cask and keg, but sometimes, and in some countries, you have to settle for the second best.
But innovation takes place in fields far removed the craft beer world as well. Like in Switzerland. With slipping margins and the big brewers devouring each other, some Swiss guys think the solution is to prolong the shelf life of pale lagers.
A marketing man named Adami Jean Nicolas tells us that dissolved or residual oxygen in beer is a serious problem. With his new tool you can measure contamination in parts per billion.
I beg to ask if oxygen appearing as a result of a natural brewing process can be called contamination. And I would add that brewing for flavour instead of volume is something that may be considered.
Productivity gains are key to increase the brewery’s margins, says Mr. Nicolas.
I’ve discussed this view of the world with other beer hounds on various occasions. We often scratch our heads and wonder why the big brewers don’t focus more on quality. One reason is that they are trained as mechanical engineers in a German tradition. Keeping the machines running without any glitches and keeping a steady output at a stable quality is the only thing that matters. That the finished product is intended for human consumption is of minor interest.
If you brew according to these principles and hire marketing men who don’t really like beer, you end up in the present situation. A desperate scramble for dwindling market shares – while the craft brewers are doing pretty well. And they don’t lose a moments’ sleep worrying about that oxygen that makes up one part in a billion.
I wonder what the effects of a little oxygen are. Oxygen will acidify the beer (from ethanol to acetic acid) and maybe help break down some of the more complex molecules. At really low concentrations this would not matter that much I guess. Is oxygen contamination the limiting factor of the shelf life of pale lagers? How long shelf life do they have now anyway? 6 months? I’d guess higher turn-over would be better than longer shelf life.
What is the point of increasing shelf life?
Oh! yeah, the accountants say that beer has to leave the factory and create turnover as fast as that is humanly possible, hence, the very short lagering some beers have. In a low season people will not buy that much beer and therefore, the shelf life needs to be as long as possible, and there you have it, someone who doesn’t care the least bit about quality comes out with a magic solution.
Yet the solution already exists and it’s employed by most Czech micros. It is so simple that it’s stupid. You just let the beer lager longer! Try to explain that to an accountant, though.
Problem here is that many industrial breweries are managed by accountants. For them, beer is the same as shoes, furniture or cars.
I agree with Pivni Filosof on the accountant management.
It’s the same in my country (Slovenia –> http://www.slovenia.si). I talked to the head of the quality department of our second largest brewery (www.pivo-union.si) in April this year and he said the same thing – you have the accounting/sales department and you have the “brewers’ department”. And sadly it is the accounting/sales department that tells the brewers what to do and how to do it.
That’s why we don’t have any domestic wheat beers or the like produced here, just some rather mediocre lagers.
(Not that this is something new or unheard-of, of course)
Thanks for the comments, both of you. Welcome as a beer blogger, Heimdall, hope there will be an English version soon!
Good post Knut. There is nothing there I disagree with.