Playing white noise to beer has been shown to speed up fermentation by up to 20%, according to new research.
In a basement at Otago University, food scientist Dr Parise Adadi has completed his PhD playing sounds through a submersible speaker into brewing beer.
“The vibration keeps more yeast in suspension… and by consuming more sugar, that’s speeding the fermentation,” he told 1News.
He has studied fermentation for over a decade at universities in Ghana, Russia and now Otago.
It normally takes up to a week to brew beer, but Adadi’s trials in the lab and at a 50L scale have cut the wait by more than a day.
“Twenty to 31 hours without significantly influencing the flavour,” he said.
Associate Professor Graham Eyres told 1News the pair “cracked a beer” to celebrate the findings.
The next challenge was to replicate the speedy results at an industrial scale.
The duo made the trip to Wellington to trial 1200 litres at Garage Project using white noise, with some success.
The craft beer business had previously played orchestral music to fermenting beer – just for fun.
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Garage Project co-founder Pete Gillespie said: “When it was in the height of fermentation, we played it really frenetic, energetic classical music, and then for the conditioning, cold conditioning period at the end, we played it very calm, soothing classical music.”
To their surprise, it sped up the brewing, so Garage Project was keen to team up with Otago to trial white noise too.
“The possibility of being able to shave one or two days off every ferment and still have a beer that tastes great – I mean, it could be a real groundbreaker.”
Gillespie said it “should be relatively easy to retrofit that to any tank” with a speaker as trialled.
Eyres said the results aren’t just important for brewers.
“Anything that we can speed up a fermentation process could be relevant to other applications, including biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, winery and yeast growth.”
