A groundswell of brewers are using Hop Products Australia’s antifoam and hop extract products, with resulting efficiency and quality benefits.

Antifoams
The Advanced Hop Products range includes Lipohop K Antifoam, which proved imperative when Moon Dog introduced new brewing equipment last year, brewer Adrian McNulty says.

“Since we got the larger brewing kit, that pumps out a massive amount of energy and the foam is continuously generated throughout the course of the boil,” he says.

Hop Products Australia offers Advanced Hop Products with several different applications

“I’ve found the Lipohop K pretty good at keeping it to a dull roar, rather than something that’s climbing out the flue and depositing protein all over the roof.

“If we don’t use the Lipohop K it will just keep foaming and foaming and foaming for the duration of the boil,” McNulty says.

Sydney’s Modus Operandi has also been using the HopAid fermenter antifoam product to avoid wastage and improve its head retention, according to head brewer Dennis De Boer.

“We fill our tanks pretty full and noticed every morning after a brew there would be a lot of foam and beer on the floor,” he says.

“We knew with that foam loss we were also losing head retention, which is something we value in our beer.

“You’re blowing off a lot of your head retention positive proteins in that krausen foam, so we’re trying to keep in as much of that as possible.”

FLEX
De Boer has also been using HPA’s product FLEX, a new bittering product with low viscosity at room temperature that, unlike regular CO2 extracts, makes it easy to measure and dose.

“We’ve been using extract for bittering for a while now and we’ve noticed we get a smoother, slicker bitterness versus the harsher, occasionally vegetal attributes you can get from using whole leaf or pellet hops,” he says.

“We jumped to FLEX just for its ease of use. With regular extract you have to heat it up to get it out of the tin.

“At our scale we’re not using full tins to bitter, so FLEX is just a lot easier on a small scale,” says De Boer.

Tetrahop Gold
Also in the advanced product range is Tetrahop Gold, a tetrahydroxy alpha acid providing light stable bittering and foam stability, which has been employed by Matt Hogan of Hope Brewhouse in the Hunter Valley, NSW.

“I felt that the foam stability in our Munich Lager wasn’t up to scratch. I tried tweaking a bunch of other things in the recipe but I didn’t want to throw a heap of protein in there to change the flavour profile,” he says.

“I went down the path of looking at other options for foam stability and tetra seemed like a nice little alternative – I just dose it in at filtration.

“It seems to have done the trick. We went from silver medals to gold medals for those beers at the Sydney Royal Beer & Cider Show,” Hogan says.

Go to www.hops.com.au for more information on HPA’s advanced product range, or email Owen.Johnston@hops.com.au to discuss your advanced product requirements.