Beer cash bittersweet symphony
Universities win $1m grant to study effects of music on fermentation, but not everyone is fizzing, writes Jono Galuszka.
New Zealand’s beers could soon be alive with the sound of music.
Auckland and Otago universities have just been awarded $1 million of taxpayer money through this year’s Endeavour Fund to research how sound waves affect beer fermentation.
During the study speakers will be submerged in beer to play sounds and music to the yeast. The process will then be monitored to find out if it will make the beer ferment faster or impart better flavours and aromas.
It may sound like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but a scientist says it could affect everything from your pint of beer to cleaning products and medication.
However Taxpayers Union spokesman Matthew Rhodes described the grants as ‘‘corporate welfare’’.
‘‘Serious questions have to be asked of the value of the Government paying big bucks for research like this.
‘‘If the research was worth it, surely private breweries would pay. Instead, taxpayers are treated as mugs, and made to fork out for it. Even if the research results in anything valuable, the private breweries are the only ones who will see the returns.’’
Marine scientist and University of Auckland professor Andrew Jeffs said coral reefs made sounds that attracted marine larvae.
But larvae was difficult to work with, hence the move to yeast.
‘‘You can also drink the experiment.’’
If successful, the concept could be applied to any part of the $174 billion global fermentation industry, including medication and cleaning-product manufacture, Jeffs said.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has awarded the money to the universities over three years to work with Wellington-based brewery Garage Project.
Garage Project head brewer and co-founder Pete Gillespie looked forward to working with Jeffs again.
Some winemakers play music in their barrel rooms, but the brewery wanted to take it a step further by putting a waterproof speaker directly in the beer, he said.
Their first beer, a Viennese lager called Resonance, involved playing the beer orchestral music matched to the fermentation stages.
‘‘There was romantic music for the early stage of bubbling and growing, gradually building up as fermentation increased, then really exuberant and frantic classical when it was at peak fermentation,’’ Gillespie said.
‘‘It was beautiful and calm music for the cold conditioning, letting it know it was time to go to sleep.’’
The second beer, Dark Resonance, was a strong black IPA subjected to an 11-day playlist of death, doom and black metal.
The music would sometimes echo out of the fermenter into the brewery, disturbing some workers, he said.
‘‘The tank itself was terrifying. I would be in there on my own, it would go quiet and suddenly I’d hear some pig squealing.’’
Gillespie said Resonance fermented better than expected.
The same could not be said for Dark Resonance, which Gillespie put down to a speaker detaching from the side of the fermenter.
If sound waves did encourage yeast activity, yeast which stopped fermenting too early could be restarted, saving an entire batch of beer.
‘‘It’s a very particular application, rather than just playing music to a beer,’’ Gillespie said.
Fork Brewing brewer Kelly Ryan has also experimented with sound’s impact on fermentation, strapping speakers to a fermenter and pulsing ultrasonic noise to a batch of his Low Blow pale ale he called Low Noise.
Low Noise had less yeast growth, which increased perceived bitterness and reduced wastage.
‘‘I didn’t really expect anything, just a bit of fun and a cool story,’’ he said.