Lesson 2 - Warm and Cold Maturation
This lesson explores the processes of warm maturation and cold maturation. Warm maturation can also be described as flavour maturation This process removes negative or unwanted flavours from the beer post-fermentation. Cold maturation occurs at lower temperatures (below 0°C), which in turn causes haze-forming components to form. These components can then be removed by precipitation or clarification via centrifuge or filtration. This lesson highlights the importance of these processes, how they affect the quality of the final product, and how we manage these maturation steps.
Point of Reflection – Reconvene
Welcome back. So, what were your thoughts?
You must first ascertain how much beer the brewery needs to brew annually. You also need to consider future beer volume growth, to ensure there are enough vessels.
You must consider maturation residence time and how frequently you would fill and empty vessels. From this, you can then calculate how many times you would need to fill a maturation vessel based on brew length and therefore how many vessels you would need.
Other areas for consideration:
Would the brewery benefit from installing unitanks/dual purpose vessels?
What shape vessel would best suit your brewery and brands? Does the brewery traditionally use a certain type of vessel?
Would you consider installing maturation vessels that could hold more than one brew to reduce footprint?
What minimum volume of beer could you age in the vessels? If you wanted to do one-off beers or special additions, would you install small vessels also?
What are your projected brewing volumes, and will the new maturation vessel farm be large enough to cope with additional volumes?
Will the new vessel farm be large enough to cope with the different number of brew streams?
How do you intend to improve the process time? Can you shorten this? If so, by how much?
Will your utilities plant be able to support a larger vessel farm? Will you need to upgrade cooling capacity too?
As you can see, there are many factors to consider, which make this process a little more complicated than it might have first appeared! Depending on future volumes, the number of brew streams, and the potential reduction in process time, you may want to install different sized vessels. You may also want to install larger or additional vessels should volumes increase in the future.
You must consider the mix of beer styles and volumes that you produce now and those you may produce in the future. As long as you consider industry trends and your medium- to long-term business strategy, you will be on course for success!
We now have a good understanding of the design requirements of a maturation vessel. Let us now look at what warm maturation entails in more detail and explore how the maturation vessel is designed to handle this.