Pilot UCC brewery hopes to give industry a bit of a lift

The brewing industry in the Republic has a valuable new ally following the completion of a large pilot-scale brewery on the University College, Cork (UCC) campus. Based in the Food Processing Hall, the facility has a 1,000 litre-capacity brew house, grain roller mill and filling line for bottles and kegs.

It has already gone into production, initially adopting a particularly German flavour by turning out German festival beer and a dark lager or "dunkel bier". In keeping with this theme, UCC has hired German brewers to work at the plant and products so far have conformed to the strict German purity laws, according to Dr Elke Arendt, lecturer in the Department of Food Technology at UCC and appropriately enough, a German national.

It may seem the height of folly - or perhaps inspiration - to build a working brewery on a university campus, but Dr Arendt is quick to point out that its main purpose is for research, not to quench a collective thirst.

"It is purely a research and training facility," she said. The Revenue Commissioners, she added, would take a dim view of any attempt to sell the plant's output, although it is possible to provide its beers free of charge for special on-campus events.

Its particular appeal is its size, Dr Arendt. "It is a fairly big brewery. Most of the research institutes would only have [a capacity of] a few hundred litres, but ours is 1,000 litres. It is much more realistic when you train people on a large pilot plant than on a small unit."

The head of department, Prof Charles Daly, was a driving force behind the installation of the plant and UCC drew on the advice and experience of Murphy's, Beamish and Crawford and Guinness Group when deciding what to build. The industry view, Dr Arendt said, was that if UCC hoped to maximise linkages with the industry it should choose as large a facility as possible "because the flavour is not the same when you use a 100-litre fermenter compared with a 1,000-litre plant".

The brewery, which cost £500,000 including related analytical equipment, has only been in place since December but the research effort and collaboration with industry is already well under way. UCC is involved in a number of research projects, looking at things such as brewing with unmalted cereals, acidification of the beer mash and wort and optimising the availability of enzymes to help along the fermenting process.

Dr Arendt is deeply involved in a collaborative project with Murphy's Brewery and the Kinsale Brewery which is examining a way to improve the brewing process by introducing a strain of bacteria from the Lactobacillus family, a group which produces lactic acid.

"Normally you would associate lactic acid bacteria with beer spoilage," Dr Arendt explained. If used in the correct way, however, they can help by increasing the acidity of the mash and by introducing extra enzymes that can help fermentation, she said. "It is a flavour thing, and people are trying to get more and more natural ingredients into their products."

The work involves a close examination of what is actually going on in the various vats and tuns as the ingredients are processed. It all comes down to keeping the yeasts happy because these are the organisms that do the magic, changing sugar and nutrients into alcohol.

The sugar and nutrients in the form of amino acids are provided early on in the mashing process when malted barley is added to water to produce the wort. The sprouted barley contains enzymes which can break down proteins in the wort into amino acids, but the enzymes work best if things are a bit acidic.

Brewers usually add artificially produced organic acids or calcium sulphate or calcium chloride to achieve this acidity, but Dr Arendt is using lactic acid bacteria mixed with the wort to increase acidity. "It has been used in Germany for a while," she said. "What we are trying to do is get bacteria that [improve acidity] but also have enzymes themselves."

The object is to get more and happier enzymes in place to produce more sugar and amino acids faster, in turn speeding up the mashing process, but also later fermentation after the yeast is added. Another benefit, she said, would be reduced levels of unused proteins which can cause a haze in the finished beer.

"Your beer has better taste, better foam stability and improved taste stability" so it spoils more slowly, she said. These attributes would in turn mean cheaper, faster processing for the big breweries - hence their interest in the research under way at UCC. "At the moment all of the research we are doing is applicable to the industry."

Beer production is barely under way at UCC. "We haven't made that much yet, but we will," Dr Arendt said. What may sound like Utopia, copious amounts of free beer, does have its down side however, simply because of its volume. "That is the drawback of the large plant, there is so much left over." This becomes particularly acute if an experiment produces a mediocre brew. If the batch is bad, she said, then nobody wants it even when offered for free.