Lesson 6 - Process Aids and Additions
This lesson discusses the function of process aids and how they improve colloidal stability. It also explores filter aids, post-fermentation additions, and the use of deaerated water as tools to enable a brewer to meet their final pack beer quality specifications.
Sugar
Primings, also simply known as sugar, can be added to beer post-fermentation. They provide flavour or act as a fermentable extract for bottle-conditioning. They are typically sucrose or glucose.
The bottle-conditioning technique involves adding priming sugars to the beer before bottling that yeast ferments in the bottle increasing carbonation.
Some brewers add sugar to filtered beer to provide sweetness. Where this is done we should thus take measures to ensure the beer is free of microbiological contamination. It is often necessary to pasteurise the beer to a higher level of pasteurisation units.