Dispensing Newfangled, Old-Fashioned Beverages

Magpie&Marten | Dear readers: The following discussion continues one that began in our previous column in the print edition of Brauwelt International, which is about cleaning and maintaining dispensing lines in the challenging milieu of serving modern non-alcoholic beverages and low-alcohol beers.

In beer’s 10,000+ year history, humans have never had to worry about it going off – well, not really worry. Now…beer can go bad. It can become oxidized and old tasting, turn gnarly and ropey, funky and skunky, sour and vinegary, sulphury and rubbery or smell like someone lit a match and started burning electrical tape in a prank that got out of hand at the local pharmacy. In which case – if it is indeed just beer and not spiked with something else – it will not harm the drinker, even if he dares to imbibe such a foul-smelling liquid after gingerly venturing a whiff (we write he, because she wouldn’t do such a thing). If a beer is undrinkable, it might be recoverable through longer maturation with fresh yeast or, if not, it can be distilled, sprinkled over fish and chips or, in a worst-case scenario, dumped.

The ancient peoples of the Near East, from Eastern Anatolia down to those who established the first cities in Mesopotamia, could drink beer made with water that was less than potable, which in cities, is invaluable. Beer has served us well since then and ushered in civilization, and if truth be told, has been a distinguishing characteristic and a redeeming feature of civilized life for millennia. The first farmers making the slow trudge west across Europe, disseminating beakers, proto-languages, metallurgy, animal husbandry and good cheer were wary of many dangers but likely didn’t need to worry about their beer – except when there wasn’t enough to go around. Even with the rise of the first industrial breweries, the equipment and processes necessary for the mass production and transport as well as the colloidal and flavor stability of the beer were on the minds of brewery workers. However, humans have never had to worry about beer harboring pathogens…until now.

It must be said that we enjoy – and hope that you, dear readers, can tolerate – humorous hyperbole from time to time. Perhaps we seem to make out high, majestic peaks on the horizon where, in fact, diminutive, subterranean mammals have only been burrowing and thereby heaping up tiny mounds of loose dirt in the foreground. Nevertheless, if one exenterates beer to the point that the resultant beverage made from identical ingredients resembles it in name only, because the production process has been distorted out of proportion to serve a new purpose while still pretending it is the same beverage, then it is conceivable that one would need to pause and reflect. There may actually be a few unpleasant consequences to one’s actions. In a few parts of the world, where regulations are less strict, we seem to be discovering them as they happen.

These might be dubbed newfangled, old-fashioned beverages (NOFBs?), since they’re based on a venerable drink, and are therefore perceived as such, but are something quite novel and unique as beverages go. This is the crux. Non-alcoholic beer, in particular, is not fruit juice but might as well be treated like it. NA beer in the US has a history going back to attempts to create it during Prohibition. What spurred on the production of the oldest NA beer still in existence in the US also has its origins in the Near East! But this time in the 1970s, when a Texas oilman from San Antonio sold Texas Select (beer with alcohol distilled off) to locals who’d developed a taste for beer on visits to the US but in whose countries alcoholic beverages were and continue to be illegal. The popularity of NA beer has risen steeply recently, drawing the interest of mom-and-pop neighborhood brewers. 

There are creatures who’ve accompanied, adapted to and occasionally harried us on our long journey across time from hunter-gatherers to modern city-dwellers. We’re not referring to Rattus rattus but rather to the much tinier (and slimier) dispensing line microbiota. They do not plague our brethren who produce NA beer and subsequently bottle or can it, because these unpleasant characters are eliminated by the downstream pasteurization process. (One hopes and assumes that those packaging in bottles and cans do indeed pasteurize after filling.) NA beer dispensed on draft is another matter. Even if a flash pasteurizer is employed prior to kegging, some peril may still remain, since regular dispensing line microbiota – those we are accustomed to and have to wage a constant war against through regular, thorough cleaning – might be joined by unfamiliar guests when the age-old attributes of beer are abruptly altered. These accompanying microbes are present all the time; they are simply distressed by beer to the point that they don’t reproduce, don’t thrive and thus don’t do any harm. With the degree of attenuation (or lack of it), pH value, bitterness, alcohol content and anaerobic conditions being potentially quite different, these unfamiliar visitors may come to feel right at home.

Scientists at Cornell University conducted a study recently, which was published in The Journal of Food Protection, and found that NA beer allows for the propagation of harmful bacteria, such as E. coli, Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella enterica. NA beer proved to be a better substrate for the growth of these bacteria than low-alcohol beer. The pathogens that particularly prospered in the NA beer were those stored for a couple of months at warmer temperatures, at a mere 14°C, which is well below room temperature. Little growth of these pathogens was observed in NA beer stored at a few degrees above freezing (4°C). Thus, keeping NA beer at a low storage temperature is another measure for reducing the proliferation of pathogenic bacteria, in addition to all of the other precautions one would normally take to maintain a hygienic dispensing environment. The study contributes another voice in the earnest appeal for regulators to propose new guidelines specific to non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beer.

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