In large-sized breweries, rough beer clarification is still carried out using Kieselguhr filters notwithstanding their environmental and safety implications. The main aim of this work was to test an innovative rough beer clarification and stabilization process involving enzymatic treating with Brewers Clarex®, centrifuging, rough filtering across 1.4-μm ceramic hollow-fiber membrane at 30 °C, and fine filtering through 0.45-μm cartridge filter. When feeding an enzymatically-pretreated and centrifuged rough beer with permanent haze (HP) of 2 or 14 European Brewery Convention unit (EBC-U), its primary clarification under periodic CO2 backflushing yielded a permeate with turbidity of 1.0-1.5 EBC-U at a high permeation flux (2.173 ± 51 or 593 ± 100 L m-2 h-1), much greater than that typical of powder filters. The final beer was brilliant (HP = 0.57 ± 0.08 EBC-U) with almost the same colloidal stability of the industrial control and an overall log reduction value (~5.0 for the selected beer spoilage bacterium or 7.6 for the brewing yeast) in line with the microbial effectiveness of current sterilizing membranes. It was perceived as significantly different in flavor and body from the industrial control at a probability level of 10% by a triangle sensory test, as more likely related to the several lab-scale beer-racking steps used than to the novel process itself.
Keywords: Brewers Clarex®; Lactobacillus brevis; Saccharomyces carlsbergensis; beer; ceramic hollow-fiber membrane; colloidal stability; crossflow microfiltration; dead-end filtration; sensory analysis.