CBS Customized Brewing Solutions supplies a product line named « Brand Final Touch » allowing to produce « special beers » by adding to a normal pale beer just before bottling.

With our Brand Final Touch range of products, we can produce the following beers from a unique neutral lager: Premium Beer, Witbier, Abbey Beer, Sour Ale, Weizenbier, Stout, IPA, Grapefruit Beer, Cherry Beer, Raspberry Beer, Strawberry Beer, Mojito Beer, Sweet Rhum Beer, Daiquiri Beer, Lychee Beer, Peach Beer, etc. For more information, contact our technical team.

All our « final touch » beer brand producers contain exclusively natural aroma compounds (fruits and spices aroma compounds), natural colouring (fruit colours and dark malt extracts) and clouding agents (essential oils emulsions stabilised with vegetal gums).

WB-MIX has been set up to produce white beers with taste, flavour and cloudy aspect similar to main commercial Belgian white beers which are refreshing and thirst-quenching. WB-MIX has to be added to a standard base beer with low bitterness (10-12 EBU) as unique requisite to obtain a white beer. This brand maker can be customized on demand. (WB-MIX Project).

PF-MIX-HOP range of products allows to improve the palate fullness, the freshness and the hop aroma of the base beer. It improves the drinkability and delays the appearence of staling off-flavours. The resulting beer is a well balanced Premium Beer with increased shelf life..

Among other CBS brand producers the following could be mentioned: KB-MIX (fruits and spices colour and aroma compounds) to produce cherry beer (kriek-like), fruits and spices colour and aroma compounds for raspberry beer, fruits and spices aroma compounds for peach beer, Spring-MIX (spices aroma compounds), PF-MIX to impart palate fullness and a long list of customized brand makers (brown beer producer, ginger ale producer, etc).

All these brand producers can be used to produce low alcohol content (as low as 0.5% v/v) special beers (low alcohol white beer, kriek, etc).

Substitution of part of classical hopping by a product isomerized at high concentration can contribute to improve beer staling resistance. (Anti-Staling).

3) COLOUR ADJUSTEMENT

Beer colouring with dark malt extract is in high demand by dose marketing their beer on an « additive free » platform.

Improvement of resistance against beer staling

Last scientific researches confirm that the staling-potential of a beer is essentially determined in the brewhouse. Therefore it is very important to act as soon as possible in the brewing process.

First of all by trying to minimize oxygen presence (flours, brewing water, brewing under CO2, etc) and by decreasing malt lipoxygenase action during brewing (unsaturated lipids oxydation to lipid peroxides that can oxidize proteins and that can act during wort boiling as precursors of compounds like trans-2-nonenal).
After that care has to be taken during wort boiling to minimize oxidation processes and especially lipids oxidation (peroxides lipids). Oxidation reaction products like trans-2-nonenal (cardboard taste) can in the first place establish bounds with compounds like sulfites for example that make them imperceptible in just bottled beer. Later, these sulfites become gradually oxidized in the beer bottle releasing the undesirable compounds that become perceptible at this moment.

The use of an antioxidant and natural reducing agent at mashing-in (Tannox-Brew) allows to decrease malt lipoxygenase action (more than 50%). In fact lipoxygenase needs its core to be at ferric state (Fe3+) as well as molecular oxygen presence to oxidize lipids into peroxides. Ferric core reduction into ferrous iron deactivates this enzyme. The decrease of oxygen disponibility slackens lipoxygenase action. TANNOX-BREW antioxidant action also decreases proteins oxidation and therefore increases wort filtration rate. The use of classical antioxidants like ascorbic acid-sulfites couple during wort boiling completes this first anti-staling action in the brewhouse.

Tannox-Brew

During wort boiling hop is added to perform isomerisation step. Hop also can then be oxidized giving rise to several compounds that can significantly participate to typical tastes and flavours faults of stale beers. Separated isomerisation of a very concentrated hop extract solution (a minimum of 20% of alpha acids in solution) allows to minimize hop oxidation thanks to natural hop reducing power. This reducing power is significant when isomerisation is performed on a concentrated hop extract solution but it is not sufficient at usual concentration in wort. Substitution of a part of classical hopping by a product like Isototal isomerized at high concentration can also contribute significantly to improve beer anti-staling resitance.

Fight against oxygen presence in beer has to be continued by classical ways during bottling and by adding an antioxidant to finished beer.

Isototal

WB-MIX project began in 1997. The aim was to provide a method to produce a Belgian type white beer by privileging production flexibility allowing a quick response to new markets demands.

WB-MIX is the result of a market survey, a marketing strategy, fundamental search on flavours (beers and spices), adjustment of search results to the consumer (tastings) and the follow-up of beers produced by this way since 1997.

WB-MIX-1 formula setting was carried out after making a survey of the reasons of the success of white beer in Belgium that passed from being a village beer in 1978 to be currently produced at the rate of 1 000 000 Hl/year. This success is due to the fact that a whole rising generation liked this low bitter beer flavoured with spices. It was an alternative to classical beer taste, between beer and soft drink. Moreover, the product was well differentiated by its turbid aspect giving rise to a fashion trend similar to that which occurred with a popular Mexican beer in colourless bottle and served with a lemon piece in the bottle neck. The Belgian type white beer pleased the people who did not like so much normal beer and who wanted to drink another thing than soft drinks.

Our target was thus a person who did not like traditional beer and who was not a white beer expert. We analyzed 60 white beers (see Table below). On these values basis and the results of tasting pannels established according to our target definition, we composed a series of WB-MIX. Then we made consumer tests (hypermarkets) in countries with low culture of white beers. WB-MIX-1 came out due to its high « drinkability ». This formula can however be customized according to the own criteria of the brewer.

The use of WB-MIX offers several advantages in comparison with the traditional method which involves the use of spices in the brewhouse and « special » yeast strains producing the metabolites which impart to beer typical white type flavour and taste (essentially phenolic compounds: vinylguaïacol, eugenol, acetovanillone, etc.):

1) The use of WB-MIX avoids production problems involved in the use of spices in the brewhouse:
– microbiological problems due to the presence of a whole series of exotic microorganisms on spices ;
– aromatic character variations from crop to crop and from one provider to another ;
– deterioration of spices aromatic properties during storage ;
– extract yield variations of spices aromatic compounds in the boiling kettle.

2) WB-MIX use avoids production problems related to the use of a different yeast strain to produce the metabolites that impart the typical white beer taste since similar compounds to these typical metabolites are found in the specific spices contained in WB MIX.

3) The use of WB-MIX gives a higher taste reproducibility because all the aromatic compounds of the mixture coming from spice CO2 extracts are standardized so as to have always the same concentration in this mixture.

4) High reproducibility of beer turbid aspect.

5) New white beer production start-up can be done very easily since we can use as base beer a beer already produced in the brewery (the unique requisite being a low bitterness: 10-12 EBU).

6) The use of WB-MIX offers high production flexibility allowing a fast response to the market.

7) All the ingredients of WB-MIX are 100% natural and can be mentioned on the label of beer like vegetable extracts or natural flavours or spices or beer aromatized with spices (Benelux AR 31 March 93 beer Article 4 § 2).

8) This production way allows to produce a Belgian type white beer without alcohol (0,5% v/v).

WB-MIX is a composition and not the result of a distillation from which we can not control the components individually. The spices are extracted with CO2 and are standardized with regard to most representative component of each spice. The concentration of one spice can be modulated precisely independently from other spices. This allows to obtain an excellent reproducibility of the WB-MIX formula.

WB-MIX is the result of a market survey, a marketing strategy, fundamental search on flavours (beers and spices), adjustment of search results to the consumer (tastings) and the follow-up of beers produced by this way since 1997.