Exogenous Beta-Glucosidase

[KLITE]

Hi all

Im curious to see if anyone had ever used this enzyme in primary, or while dry hopping. I have a friend studying enology and he claims his teacher swears by it as a way to provide a more complex aromatic and flavour profile to wines by hydrolising glucosides from the grapes during fermentation. The wines he mentions ultilizing this enzyme are very expensive and mainly used on autoctonous strains of centenary plants.

I have a found a supplier which can provide this enzyme at the rate of x Units per mg. But i have no idea what kind of concentration would be a good place to start.

 

[Yooper]

I've never really thought about it, but I remembered something we talked about a couple of years ago. I dug up this article: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/unlocking-hop-and-fruit-flavors-from-glycosides.html

 

[KLITE]

I've never really thought about it, but I remembered something we talked about a couple of years ago. I dug up this article: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/unlocking-hop-and-fruit-flavors-from-glycosides.html

ye i too have across that, i been reading a lot! about the enzymatic role in brewing and i think thats the best way to get extra hydrocarbons and flavonoids from the hops. A lot of these compounds are present in plant matter in a glyconjugated form.
It also seems that saccharomyce strains produce relatively low levels of this required enzyme, slightly higher at higher fermentation temps can be produced by certain strains.
I see it a way to provide another layer of taste and aroma by literally freeing up more aromatic compounds from the plant. Im definetly gonna play about with it but need a bit of a notion. Though tbh im thinking anywhere between 5 to 10 units per liter might be a good starting point if i think im understanding the rate of enzymatic activity correctly.

 

[KLITE]

found this study on it:

http://youngscientistssymposium.org/YSS2016/pdf/Kirkpatrick.pdf

I cant find much on the product hoptimase, but it seems its a mix of pectinase and beta glucosidase. I have no idea of ration but they claim to have used it at 1000ppm? that seems ridiculously high since a good baseline for adding pectinase to beer is around 2mg per liter.
It does seem to have a stastically significance in the results when adding enzymes that hydrolise glycosides. So ye i suppose it would be a good tool to experiment with.

 

[BrewZer]

This is the point in the movie where the scientist rubs her hands together and says, "with an enzyme like that, I could rule the world!"

 

[stz]

I've used it. It is sold here as a process aid called 'hopflower' though I'm sure other places retail it under different names. I believe it comes from a lab in germany and they pour it into smaller jerry cans locally. Dosage is 5-10ml per 100L. Don't know about ppm/units and doubt our supplier does either as they just repackage it. They say it works on packaged beer though you'd think during dry hop would be optimal and I'm personally sceptical of rate/speed of activity at low temperatures encountered with dry hopping.

Certain yeast strains produce the enzyme in small amounts during fermentation if they've a particular gene. Brett is supposed to produce tons. It is part of the speculation/bandwagon that accompanies BIOTRANSFORMATION and hazy beers with bits of hop pellets in them, brett IPA's with stone fruit/peach/pineapple character as well as the breakdown and release of aromatic compounds from cherry skin and stones in aged lambic.

How have I found it? I get given a free sample whenever I see the company rep because he always wants to find common ground talking hoppy beer and I occasionally throw it in a batch. While I've no doubt it does something, personally I can determine very little difference. I should AB it, but feel no need to. Supposedly the major detectable changes are linalool-glucoside cleaved to linalool if sweet basil/lavender floats your boat. Per batch cost is equal to an additional 3kg of mosaic. Best bang for buck?

 

[KLITE]

I've used it. It is sold here as a process aid called 'hopflower' though I'm sure other places retail it under different names. I believe it comes from a lab in germany and they pour it into smaller jerry cans locally. Dosage is 5-10ml per 100L. Don't know about ppm/units and doubt our supplier does either as they just repackage it. They say it works on packaged beer though you'd think during dry hop would be optimal and I'm personally sceptical of rate/speed of activity at low temperatures encountered with dry hopping.

Certain yeast strains produce the enzyme in small amounts during fermentation if they've a particular gene. Brett is supposed to produce tons. It is part of the speculation/bandwagon that accompanies BIOTRANSFORMATION and hazy beers with bits of hop pellets in them, brett IPA's with stone fruit/peach/pineapple character as well as the breakdown and release of aromatic compounds from cherry skin and stones in aged lambic.

How have I found it? I get given a free sample whenever I see the company rep because he always wants to find common ground talking hoppy beer and I occasionally throw it in a batch. While I've no doubt it does something, personally I can determine very little difference. I should AB it, but feel no need to. Supposedly the major detectable changes are linalool-glucoside cleaved to linalool if sweet basil/lavender floats your boat. Per batch cost is equal to an additional 3kg of mosaic. Best bang for buck?

I see where you coming from. One thing about the study i disliked was the tiny amount of hops used. You are right low temps wont be good for the enzyme, i have been contacted by that company and they said a good starting point is 2g per 1000/l, similar to pectinase with similar rate of enzymatic activity. They also said they like it between 4 and 7 ph though cant tolerate outside the range so perfect for beer and 20/23 theyd perform great. Also can handle alcohol like its nothing aparantly, since they said it can be used for very alcoholic wines and wine liqueurs.
From my calculations it comes to about just double the price of dried yeast so ye why not get 25mg and try it in 4 or 5 batches, i think ill try pectinase too cause thats cheap as peas in the same rate.

man greatly appreciate your input, stay hoppy as hell!

 

[KLITE]

Heres another good exposition

https://cdn.uclouvain.be/public/Exports reddot/inbr/documents/presentation-luk-daenen.pdf

 

[ttuato]

Lallzyme Beta - includes beta-glucosidase & pectinase (similar to AR2000 in the youngscientist link above). $44 for 100g from Davison Winery Supplies in Oregon. I just ordered some and will report back.

 

[rlemkin]

Lallzyme Beta - includes beta-glucosidase & pectinase (similar to AR2000 in the youngscientist link above). $44 for 100g from Davison Winery Supplies in Oregon. I just ordered some and will report back.

How did it go?

 

[Baldilocks_Brewing]

Sorry I forgot - no appreciable differences detected in blind tastings. If anything the enzyme batch had slightly more "vegetal / green" flavors than the regular batch.

On my follow-up batch I increased my dryhop (7->12oz) and got what I was looking for in my NEIPAs

 

[rinasek]

I just got one bottle today and plan to use it in my next NEIPA brew. When did you add it? In instructions, it says close to end of fermentation and I was thinking somewhere 75-90% of apparent attenuation when I add on part of dry-hop.

Also, about dosage, did you follow their instructions which come around 1g per 5gal.

 

[ttuato]

I just got one bottle today and plan to use it in my next NEIPA brew. When did you add it? In instructions, it says close to end of fermentation and I was thinking somewhere 75-90% of apparent attenuation when I add on part of dry-hop.

Also, about dosage, did you follow their instructions which come around 1g per 5gal.

1g in FOUR gallons (did a split batch without)
roughly 90-95% attenuation

Sidenote - Scott Janish and I have dialoged offline and on his blog in comments section about this. He has done some experiments with this stuff as well but I do not know the results as he is saving the details for his NEIPA book which is due out soon. I would defer to his studies & analysis before making any final conclusions.

 

[rinasek]

Thanks for the info. I know that one brewery in the region is doing this in all their NEIPAs and they claim it has a big effect.

 

[bierhaus15]

I've used 5 different beta-glucoisidase enzymes in a professional context and its impact has mostly been minor. The main issue being that the majority of these enzymes are inhibited by residual sugar in the beer; even 0.1% sugar has been enough to stop most of the activity. Where sugar is not an issue, improvements were seen with long term flavor. Unfortunately, it seems like by the time the enzyme has an impact, you've already lost much of the overall hop aroma. Who's going to wait 2 months for the enzymes to have an impact?

That said, some improvements were seen with linalool concentrations, but dry hop amount, variety, and process has had a bigger effect on final hop character than enzyme use. These results pretty much mirrored the recent findings from New Belgium as well.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Worth noting that it's glucose that inhibits it, other sugars should have less effect - so I don't know if one approach would be to mash high and have something low attenuating like a wine yeast hoovering up any free glucose whilst a higher-attenuating beer yeast works its way slowly through the complex carbohydrates.

But I suspect a better way would be to pre-treat the hops directly with enzyme before adding to the wort? Or is there enough glucose in hops to inhibit? Worth a try if you already have the enzyme?

OTOH, if you just want to add linalool, then some Nugget will do the job cheaply...

People got all excited about Sacc beta-glucosidase a couple of years back but ISTR that the general consensus was that it just didn't work terribly well. Scott Janish used Brett to release flavours from peaches.

QA23 was the main one people looked at, but Steinberger/Uvaferm 228 is probably a more friendly yeast for a co-ferment, being POF- and non-killer. Not readily available in retail packages unfortunately, other than from a few people in Eastern Europe who are repacking commercial bricks of it. Zymaflore ZL1 is another one with the enzyme and is killer neutral.