When I work as a locum brewer I often get asked “whilst you are here can you also look at…” and have a technical conundrum placed in front of me. I love questions such as these, the following is just such an example.

A client was short of staff for three months and they called me in to cover part of their brewing schedule. It was somewhere I has worked before so the packaging team quizzed me about why they were hearing complaints from customers about higher than normal ullage in the casks of late. I looked at some of their routine finings tests and it was clear they were suffering from fluffy bottoms – not something anyone wants to hear!

So we held back a batch of finished beer for a few hours before any auxiliary finings were added and was able to find the optimal levels of auxiliary and isinglass finings by some simple test work.

The issue turned out to be the level of isinglass that was being charged, the auxiliary level having been proved as optimal via my test work. I then checked out this new finings level on two other beers to confirm and was delighted to see the beer drop bright in < 30 min and give a good dense body of flocs at the bottom of the sample glass. No more fluffy bottoms!

A simple update to their packaging procedure and now a few weeks down the line the customers of my client are happy once again and thus so are they. Such is the benefit of a well trained outside eye looking at your process.