Brewing beer is easy. Four simple ingredients, and a process so straightforward that the earliest beers were brewed by accident when wet grains started to germinate and ferment. But brewing consistently high-quality beer is a different challenge, and the modern brewing process extends far beyond the simple equation of beer = water + malt + hops + yeast. Differentiating your product in a competitive market is a challenge that all brewers face. Doing all of this on a tight budget is a major challenge for many brewers today. While costs can be cut to an extent by purchasing cheaper ingredients, this comes at the risk of reducing product quality, consistency, or flavor.
Through careful optimization of each step of the brewing process, you can improve yields and efficiency, allowing you to continue to use the high-quality ingredients that define your brand. In this presentation, you will discover the full range of tools available in the Brewer’s Toolkit. Learn how to use nutrients, enzymes, process aids, flavor additions, specific yeast strains and inactive specific yeast products to improve beer quality and brewing efficiency.
Eric Abbott has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry, a M.Sc. in Botany, and 20 years of experience in the beverage industry. Since 2017, Eric has brought experience as a brewer, R&D scientist, and technical sales manager to the Lallemand Brewing technical team. As the main point of contact for brewing technical support and troubleshooting, Eric is keenly aware of the challenges that brewers face everyday. In collaboration with the Lallemand Brewing innovation team, Eric works to develop new products and resources to help brewers to improve product quality and increase brewing efficiency. Eric is a father of three daughters in the Montreal area, and he enjoys kayaking on the Rivière de Milles Iles, when it is not frozen.
What This Session Covers
This session explores how advanced ingredients and brewing aids beyond the traditional four—malt, hops, water, and yeast—can significantly enhance beer quality and brewing efficiency. It focuses on practical applications of nutrients, enzymes, and specialized yeast strains to improve raw material utilization, speed up fermentation and maturation, optimize hop aroma expression, and reduce environmental impact. For brewery owners and taproom operators, these insights translate into cost savings, higher yields, better product consistency, and shorter production cycles.
Key Talking Points
- Expanding the Brewer’s Toolkit: Nutrients, enzymes, inactive specific yeast (ISY), process aids, and specialized yeast strains can boost fermentation speed, increase yields, enhance beer stability, and improve mouthfeel beyond what traditional ingredients provide.
- Material Efficiency: Raw materials like malt, hops, and yeast account for only about 10% of total brewing costs, but optimizing their use via enzymes (e.g., fungal alpha amylase, glucanase, protease) and ISY products can reduce losses and improve extract yields. For example, enzymes break down starch and non-starch polysaccharides to release more fermentable sugars and nitrogen.
- Inactive Specific Yeast (ISY) Products: ISY enhance products are rich in manoproteins that increase beer body and mouthfeel, reduce hot burn, and can substitute for malt or adjuncts more conveniently and cost-effectively than maltodextrin. They provide higher solubility and more dissolved solids per gram compared to competitors.
- Hop Utilization and Bio-Transformation: Specific yeast strains can synergize with hop compounds, releasing aromatic terpenes and thiols through enzymatic bio-transformation. This can enhance hop aroma and flavor, allowing breweries to reduce dry hop rates without losing sensory impact. Case studies showed up to 30% hop reduction using strains like “Pomona.”
- Flavor Additions as Hop Alternatives: Purified flavor blends such as YOPS, created through precision fermentation, can replace or reduce hop usage while maintaining or enhancing aroma. Examples include BrewDog and Vertigga reducing dry hop rates by up to 50% or even 100% replacement in certain beers. These also contribute to sustainability by lowering hop agricultural impact.
- Yeast Strain Selection and Nutrient Management: High-performance yeast strains like LW Nottingham, Lal Brew House Ale, and Nova Logger enable faster fermentations at lower pitch rates, reducing yeast costs and maturation times. Nutrients—especially zinc—are critical for yeast health; zinc uptake occurs early in fermentation and supports consistent attenuation and fermentation speed, particularly with repitching.
- Process Aids to Improve Efficiency and Shelf Life: Antifoam agents reduce kettle foaming, increasing hop utilization and wort yield. Enzymes like protease reduce chill haze, and ALDC (acetolactate decarboxylase) enzymes prevent diacetyl formation, shortening maturation by reducing the need for diacetyl rests. ISY products rich in biologically bound copper efficiently remove hydrogen sulfide (H2S) off-flavors without adding free copper ions that accelerate oxidation.
- Environmental and Sustainability Benefits: Many of these innovations reduce energy consumption (e.g., shorter maturation and fermentation times), water use, and CO2 emissions. However, sustainability claims need to be data-backed; YOPS, for instance, has a verified life cycle analysis proving environmental impact reductions when replacing traditional dry hops.
- Technical Support and Resources: Lamon Brewing emphasizes strong technical customer support, providing detailed recipes, best practices, and a bio-transformation knowledge center. They offer sensory kits focused on positive hop flavors to help breweries optimize yeast and hop pairings for better bio-transformation effects.
Action Items
- Evaluate your current yeast strains and consider trialing high-performance strains like LW Nottingham or Lal Brew House Ale to reduce pitch rates and fermentation time while maintaining or improving quality.
- Incorporate specialized enzymes (e.g., fungal alpha amylase, glucanase, protease) in your mash to increase extract yield and fermentability, especially when using adjuncts or unmalted grains.
- Test inactive specific yeast (ISY) products like ISY Enhance to boost body and mouthfeel, potentially reducing malt or adjunct usage and lowering raw material costs.
- Experiment with yeast and hop combinations that promote bio-transformation to enhance hop aroma and flavor, enabling you to reduce dry hop rates without sacrificing sensory quality. Utilize resources like the bio-transformation knowledge center for guidance.
- Introduce flavor additions such as YOPS to partially or fully replace dry hops, improving hop aroma consistency and reducing costs and environmental footprint.
- Use targeted nutrients with bioavailable zinc during fermentation, especially when repitching yeast, to sustain yeast health and fermentation performance over multiple generations.
- Apply process aids like antifoam to improve hop utilization and kettle efficiency, and enzymes such as ALDC to reduce diacetyl and shorten maturation times, increasing tank turnover.
- Consider using ISY products rich in copper to remove sulfur off-flavors post-fermentation efficiently, reducing the need for extended maturation and improving overall beer quality.
- [00:00 → 07:00] Eric Abbott introduces the session, emphasizing the importance of nutrients, enzymes, and yeast in brewing beyond the four basic ingredients. He highlights the potential for these tools to improve beer quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. He introduces ISY (inactive specific yeast) products, explaining their role in enhancing body and mouthfeel through manoproteins.
- [07:00 → 15:00] Discussion of hop-related efficiency, focusing on yeast strain selection and bio-transformation. Yeast enzymes release aromatic hop compounds from precursors, enhancing aroma and flavor. Case studies show significant hop rate reductions with specific yeast strains like Pomona. Eric explains the timing of hop additions to maximize precursor extraction or free aroma preservation. He introduces flavor additions like YOPS as hop alternatives or augmentations, with examples from commercial breweries achieving major hop savings.
- [15:00 → 25:00] Overview of yeast strain innovations for faster, cleaner fermentations at lower pitch rates, including LW Nottingham, Lal Brew House Ale, and Nova Logger. Sour and lactic acid producing yeasts are presented as time-saving alternatives to kettle souring. The importance of zinc as a critical nutrient for yeast health and fermentation speed is emphasized, especially over multiple repitch generations. The “Aussie fast logger method” is explained as a way to reduce fermentation time and pitch rates while maintaining beer quality.
- [25:00 → 35:00] Process aids and enzymes to improve material efficiency and shelf life are covered. Antifoam reduces kettle losses and improves hop utilization. Compacting agents improve wort yield and beer stability. ALDC enzyme reduces diacetyl formation, shortening maturation. ISY-based copper products remove hydrogen sulfide off-flavors efficiently, avoiding long maturation times and preventing oxidation issues caused by free copper salts.
- [35:00 → 41:55] Environmental efficiency and sustainability are discussed, emphasizing energy, water, and CO2 savings from shorter production times and ingredient optimizations. Eric warns against unsubstantiated sustainability claims and highlights YOPS’s validated environmental benefits. A summary of all discussed tools and their impacts is presented. Lamon Brewing’s customer support and technical resources are offered to help breweries implement these strategies for better efficiency and beer quality.
This detailed overview provides brewery professionals with actionable knowledge to improve brewing processes, reduce costs, and enhance product quality through targeted use of advanced ingredients and process aids.