Ask The Brewmasters

  • 1.  Hop Water and Food Safety

    Posted 09-07-2022 16:14
    Hello All,

    We are working on developing a hop water product.  This is a carbonated soda water (zero alcohol) that is dry hopped, centrifuged, then canned.  We are controlling for pH prior to hop addition to be about pH 4 or lower.  We have found that there is microbiology that comes from the dry hops that stays viable in this product since we do not have the benefit of alcohol acting as a preservative.  We will be testing for coliform, however we have very little experience with this since its not a requirement for our standard beer products.

    My question: how many of you have produced a product like this and rely purely on pH and good sanitation practices (with plating QC follow up), versus tunnel pasteurizer, a preservative like sorbate or ascorbic acid, Velcorin, etc?  I'm hoping to get a sense of what is common in industry since there is not a lot of publicly available information on this type of product (it is not beer or seltzer or NA Beer).

    Thank you!

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    Robert Fulwiler
    Technical Director
    Fremont Brewing Co
    Seattle WA
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  • 2.  RE: Hop Water and Food Safety

    Posted 09-08-2022 13:25
    Hey Robert, 

    I would advise strongly that you treat this product like a food product along the lines of a soda or bottled water and follow all the procedures that come along with that. I am sure there is plenty of information on how people make their bottled water shelf stable and safe to drink. Here are some of the more familiar methods to brewing...

    1. Preservatives/ stabilizers - Sodium Benzoate, Citric Acid, Sorbic Acid, Phosphoric Acid, and more. These will have minimal impact on flavor, but no one likes them on labels.
    2. Pasteurization - Your only guaranteed way of being safe is via Tunnel Pasteurization, you would have to run some PU & plating tests to figure out the optimal (minimal) amount of pasteurization you need to be safe. Many brewers like to chance it with Flash Pasteurization, in which case I would say that you should ensure your packages are clean and your bottling/canning machine are extra clean. Any contamination post-Flash would show up down the line without further precautions (preservatives). 
    3. Ultra-filtration - Not as common among brewers, very common in wine. Filter with an Absolute filter cartridge down to 0.45micron or 0.2micron depending on your level of paranoia, cost, and product safety. An Absolute filtration will stop anything larger than the pore size it states, it is designed to fail if you try to push through it. This can be set up to filtration right into a packaging line to minimize contamination chances. 
    4. Velcorin - Not sure about this one for use in a water product. 

    Tunnel Pasteurization is your only guaranteed success, otherwise you might stack 2 of these steps. Flash + Preservatives or Filter + Preservatives. Also I believe there are some hop oil products that are designed to be microbially inhibitive? I remember seeing those awhile back as additions in the distilling industry, cannot attest to their efficacy though. 

    You should also beef up your lab to swab, plate, and PCR these products at a much higher level than you do with beer. 

    Once again I would like to reiterate, this is a FOOD product, and steps should be taken to make sure that FOOD safety protocols are followed rather than beer safety protocols. 

    Good luck!

    ------------------------------
    Jason McCammon
    Technical Sales & Product Specialist
    ATP Group
    Denver, CO
    720-788-1222
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  • 3.  RE: Hop Water and Food Safety

    Posted 09-08-2022 13:26
    Robert, thank you posing this question.  I am curious as well.  We rely on pH and good sanitation for our NA product and have plated after months and had no contamination.  Dearated water has proven to be a great way to keep the bugs at bay.

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    Landon Swanson
    Head Brewer
    Pueblo Vida Brewing
    Tucson AZ
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  • 4.  RE: Hop Water and Food Safety

    Posted 09-12-2022 16:39
    This is a timely discussion topic for us as well! We're just beginning the process of developing a similar product. One aspect I've just begun researching is the most effective enrichment media for plating. What are folks using? And is there incubation temperature overlap with beer samples, or do the water sample plates need to be warmer? (Alternately, what has been tried that doesn't work?) We use LMDA for wort/beer enrichment that I mix from a recipe, so we have the ability to assemble components and sterilize/pour them in the lab.

    Apologies if these answers are obvious and I just haven't been looking in the right places -- I've spent my whole career in breweries, and all I know for sure about water testing is that I don't know enough about it yet!

    ------------------------------
    Elizabeth Belden
    Brewer & QA Lab Manager
    Kansas City Bier Company
    Kansas City MO
    (913) 963-8278
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Hop Water and Food Safety

    Posted 09-14-2022 12:10
    I've had luck in the past with non-alcoholic and non-hopped products using Tryptic Soy Agar for food born bacterial analysis. If working with general hop resistant microbes, I'd always use a Lactic Acid Bacterial media such as HLP or NBB. Universal beer agar (with hopped water in place of the beer required for this media) would be a great option as well, especially if you're expecting no growth. You can also make it selective with the addition of 0.01-0.015% cycloheximide. Id also suggest membrane filtering your hopped water product so you have a larger sample size to measure CFUs.

    For incubation temps, I'd assume 28C would be fine for the enumeration of yeast and bacteria, but on the warmer side (30-32) for bacteria.

    ------------------------------
    Daniel Neuner
    Fiddlehead Brewing Company
    Shelburne, VT
    danneuner@fiddleheadbrewing.com
    609-670-5513
    https://fiddleheadbrewing.com/
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Hop Water and Food Safety

    Posted 09-12-2022 18:37

    Hello Robert, 

    I have in my past produced something like this at a commercial scale, and the acceptable pH range we had was 3.6-3.8. This allowed us to get away with standard CIP/SIP procedures and avoid pasteurization. For NA hop products like this, and especially if you're trying to accentuate the fruit, I would lean heavy on the acids. 

    Jason is correct here though, some sort of pasteurization is your only guarantee. 

    Cheers, 
    James



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    James Bruner
    Directory of Production
    The Bruery
    Placentia, CA
    james.bruner@thebruery.com
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  • 7.  RE: Hop Water and Food Safety

    Posted 09-14-2022 10:08
    Edited by Walter Heeb 09-14-2022 12:09
    We're also working on a NA hop seltzer/water. Like @James Bruner mentioned, we're also aiming for a pH below 4.0. We don't have the means for tunnel/flash pasteurization but we are looking into UV light during packaging. Your first reaction may make you think this will cause the product to be "lightstruck." But based on some research, that's caused by isomerized alpha acids, ours is only dry hopped. We haven't trialed it yet, but in the process of getting it done. We also plan to do an extensive amount of QAQC and keep at our facility prior to release until tests confirm a stable product.

    It's a scary world without alcohol.

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    Aaron Inkrott
    Saint Arnold Brewing Co
    Houston TX
    (713) 686-9494
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