FAQ’s

what are the main ingredients of beer?

Beer has four ingredients. Water, malt, hops, and yeast.

what is malt?

Malt is barley seeds that have been taken from the farm to a “malting house” and malted. Malting is the process of germinating the seeds and then drying them. The seeds are soaked in water multiple times over a few days. Once the seeds start to sprout, they are slowly turned over and air-dried over a week. Finally, they are dried and roasted in an oven then bagged and shipped to a brewery. Part of what is happening in the malting process is the activation of the naturally existing enzymes in the barley seed.

what are enzymes exactly?

Enzymes are proteins that act as catalysts. They speed up biological reactions in our cells, in our saliva , in malt…everywhere in nature without actually being consumed in the reaction. A good example is the catalytic converter in a car. Without enzymes, there would not be life on Earth.

Why are enzymes important in beer brewing?

In traditional beer brewing, the malting process activates the naturally occurring enzymes to multiply. These enzymes when activated again in the “mash” speed up the process of breaking down the long-chain starch molecules into different types of sugars. It’s these sugars that the yeast eats and turns into alcohol, among other bi-products.

How are your enzymes made?

Industrial enzymes are made commercially in large vats by fungi and bacteria. In some cases, the bacteria are modified genetically to produce higher concentrations of specific enzymes. They are then purified and concentrated. We have been using large-scale commercial enzymes for a very long time in detergents and many other industries. Over this time period, the process of making enzymes has become increasingly efficient and cheaper.

Are enzymes dangerous?

Enzymes exist in our bodies and almost everywhere in nature. They are themselves inert. They are not reactive, they only speed up reactions. In brewing, they are denatured because when brewing, part of the process is to boil the “wort” for an hour, which sterilizes the beer.

What’s the difference between your enzymes

and the malt enzymes?

The naturally occurring enzymes in malt are the exact same enzymes that we use. So other than the fact that we make our enzymes differently, the whole process of making beer is almost exactly the same. Ours is just more efficient.

Why is it more efficient to use exogenous enzymes?

Because of the advances in biology and industrial manufacturing, it is now much cheaper and more efficient to produce enzymes commercially than traditionally. Some of those efficiencies are a result of genetic engineering, and others are from discovering new bacteria that are better suited to create the desired enzymes. Plus, over time the enzyme industry has grown and so now there are efficiencies of scale and a better understanding of how to make enzymes. This means that if you were to go to one brewery, and you were to brew the same beer type two ways on the same system. One is with malt and the other with raw barley then all that water and energy to germinate, dry, and roast the barley into malt, would be what you save by brewing with our process. It’s as simple as that. We skip the malting process. That’s it.

Are there any other savings?

The large malting facilities have strict size of barley requirements because the size of the seed will affect the amount of enzymes and starch in the final malt. With our process, we know the amount of enzymes to starch we have because we are not malting. What this means is that we don’t reject as much barley and so are more efficient there too. But most importantly, if a farmer has a bad season, too much or too little rain, it can mean that a lot more of the farmer’s barley gets rejected. With our process again, we don’t have to reject as much grain. Another saving is the fact that we don’t have to truck and bag our grain to and from the malting house.

Are you guys anti-malt?

Not at all. In the same way that artisanal bread or cheese is a wonderful thing, so too is malt. But at a large scale, it’s very inefficient, just like hand-crafted bread or cheese. We feel there is a place for both large-scale, highly efficient beer brewing and small, local craft brewing. Having said that, craft beer could be made with raw barley too. But craft brewers are artists and like any artist should be free to work in traditional ways or modern ways. It’s not always about being efficient every waking minute of the day. But at a large scale, if it tastes exactly the same, you do have a responsibility to try and be as sustainable as you can. And over time we are confident that exogenous enzymes will play a bigger and bigger role in beer brewing.

why has no one done this before?

We honestly don’t know. We think that the large-scale breweries have known about this process for a very long time. Decades? We are pretty sure these same breweries do actually use enzymes in some form or another. But one of the reasons why they haven’t gone all out on it we think is because they have very large and long-term contracts with malting houses. Secondly, as craft beer took off there was a need for the large breweries to be seen as having tradition and malt is very much part of the tradition of beer brewing. And that ties into the last piece of our guesswork, which is the GM EV1 theory. The EV1 was a great little electric car. It had some tech issues to do with the batteries, but it could have been figured out. The bigger problem strategically for GM was that if electric was to take off, they would have to push it hard. If they pushed electric that hard then what were they saying about the combustion engines that were the mainstay of the company? They could not survive and be both an electric car company and a combustion engine company. So they stuck with the latter. It’s kind of the same with the macro breweries. But this is just conjecture…