A Natural Foam Enhancer Made From Hops

It is well known that alpha acids in hops are responsible for beers bitterness via their thermal isomerization into iso-alpha acids during the kettle boil. Alpha acids that don’t isomerize generally absorb onto the trub and yeast during fermentation, with little if any getting into the final beer.

Interestingly, alpha acids are soluble in beer and if you isolate alpha acids from CO₂ hop extract and formulate it into a standardized 20 % w/w potassium salt solution and add it to beer, postfermentation, you can dramatically improve foam stability of beer at very low concentrations.

The figure below shows the foam improvement you can have when 3 ppm of iso-alpha acids, alpha acids and tetrahydro-iso- alpha acids are added to a typical American Lager.Read the complete article here!