Beer Forum

One reason I gave up homebrewing ten years ago was I seem to have an aversion to yeast. I need to limit my sweet tooth as I can get overloaded with yeast and symptoms are headaches, drowsiness, etc. I am just one of those people that have an internal fermentation going on when I eat a lot of sweets and carbs. I love to brew, and I get great satisfaction sharing my beers with others.

I guess breweries filter or heat beer to kill yeast and remove haze causing ingredients. Then they add carbonation when they bottle. As a home brewer, that's not practicle.

I was wondering if I could heat my bottled beer, post carbonation time, to say 130 degrees to kill the yeast, and was hoping that it would not affect the beer and offer me a yeast free drink. Just an idea, and wondering if it would work. I searched the net for pasteurization info, and found nothing really oriented for the home brewer. I just bottled my first batch, and have three more carboys in various stages of primary and secondary. This batch i used carb tabs as it was short of the five gallon goal. I used 16oz EZ cappers.

Anyone out there try or know of any methods to kill the yeast in the brew before drinking?

I pasturize my cider to kill the yeast so I can back sweeten it. Just heat it up to 160 or so and then put it in a keg and cool it back down. Put the gas to it and it will be carbonated.

If I experienced unusual fatigue after ingestion of carbs I'd go get a glucose tolerance test tout suite!

Not that it will eliminate all yeast, but you could do some extended secondary conditioning and then maybe keg it, push thru a filter to another keg. I'm don't have any experience pasteurizing but it seems as that you could raise the temp before kegging and filtering if needed. Some yeasts floctuate out very well also leaving little behind. I don't know if you've thought about kegging before but it could be some of the answer to your problem.

heard the guy on the radio today talk about filtering, keg to keg, etc. I envisioned warming beer to kill yeast working easier at this point. I will experiment with some bottles i put up today in a few weeks and report back.

Does bread have the same effect on you? Because the yeast in that is most certainly dead. even dead yeast might give you the same issues.
I was always of the impression that breweries which pasteurized their beer filtered the yeast out first, then carbonated before bottling and pasteurizing.
You might find keg to keg filtering and force combining is the only way to go. If you're not into kegging yet, this might be the time to took about it. (it's so much better, you wouldn't regret it)

Anyway, good luck!

Spurtrax wrote:I pasturize my cider to kill the yeast so I can back sweeten it. Just heat it up to 160 or so and then put it in a keg and cool it back down. Put the gas to it and it will be carbonated.

While I personally have not and probably will not experiment with Flash Pastuerization, I would give what Spurtrax said a try. However just in case shit hits the fan only try this on maybe 5 or so bottles so your whole batch isn't ruined. Make sure to compare these bottles to the non-pasteurized bottles to see how they taste and how well they age.

According to research that Cornell University did with cider, they had the best results with getting the cider to 155 - 160 degrees and holding it there for 6 seconds. In their case they were attempting to kill off e. coli and they were 99.9% successful. The tricky part seemed to be getting the liquid to 155-160 really quick and then quickly getting it back down to room temp in an immediate fashion. The longer it took to transition from these phases the more likely they noticed a degradation in their cider.

I can't really tell you how much this translates to beer but let us know how your experiment turns out.

i would suggest putting the now-carbed ready to drink bottles in close to 32F for a week or so and ALL the yeast will have flocculated. be mindfull of not stirring the dregs up when drinking. look in a sierra nevada and the yeast is very light dusting, yours will be very easy to see in contrast.