ICBS Pilot Brewing Facilities

The International Centre for Brewing Science houses state of the art pilot brewing facilities, with the capability to perform scaleable research for the global brewing industry.

Our 10 hL research brewery features: Hammer or 2-roll mills, Brewhouse with MCV, cereal cooking/ decoction mashing options, mash filter, lauter tun and EWB kettle whirlpool with simmer and strip capability; fermentation tank farm (1 x 20 hL, 2 x 10 hL, 2 x 5 hL & 3 x 1hL stirred multi-purpose vessels), beer chiller, centrifuge, stabilisation and cartridge filtration into 2 x 5 hL BBT’s and packaging into glass bottle (at low in-pack oxygen levels) or keg/cask.

For more information and enquiries about contract research possibilities, please e-mail: brewing.science@nottingham.ac.uk

ICBS Research

Themes of research within the group include:

• Reducing the carbon and water footprints of malting and brewing.
• Development of high/ very high gravity brewing practices.
• Future fermentables and adjunct brewing
• Improving the sensory quality of no/low alcohol beers.
• Beer sensory quality and freshness retention.
• Yeast health and fermentation performance.

Key aims and expertise

The University of Nottingham is a centre of excellence for brewing technologies and research, based within the School of Biosciences. Our scientists work with the brewing industry to meet the challenges of the 21st century; researching novel process developments targeted towards increased sustainability, efficient resource usage and minimising waste or effluents. The approach is truly multi-disciplinary, providing new solutions by bringing together expertise in crop science, malting, brewing, engineering, novel materials and environmental science.

Current projects

• Valorisation of hop agricultural and processing co-products  - COOK

• Yeast stress and fermentation performance - POWELL

• The prebiotic potential of dietary fibre and polyphenolic compounds in non-alcoholic beer - LAWRENCE

• Development of next generation drying and roasting technologies for the malting industry – COOK

• Yeast strain selection for novel flavours in distilled spirits - POWELL

• Identifying blocking factors in cross-flow membrane beer filtration – WHITE

• An untargeted metabolomics approach to identifying novel beer flavour stability marker compounds - COOK

• Flavour improvement of no/low alcohol beers – FORD

• Assuring the future sustainable supply of UK malting barley – BARIToNE Doctoral Training Partnership – COOK

Significant results

• Our research demonstrated increased consistency and more rapid attenuation of industrial scale fermentations using a pumped-loop mixing system. These are readily retro-fitted and have been adopted by some of the world’s major brewing companies.

• Work at Nottingham on the Simmer and Strip wort boiling system has supported its roll-out across many AB InBev breweries, achieving energy use reductions of 50-80% across the boil.

• Yeast strains differ with regard to their genetic stability.

• We partnered with researchers at KU Leuven to develop and validate a process for brewing lager beer using green (un-kilned) malt Such processes would facilitate considerable energy and water use reductions where malting and brewing plant are co-located.

• Our team have pioneered understanding of the quality of bitterness of beers as influenced by bitter compounds in beer and hop aroma.

• We used Analytical Ultracentrifugation to demonstrate the presence of very high molecular weight proanthocyanidins in hops. In parallel studies the action of these molecules as natural beer fining agents was demonstrated.