Like brewers and marketers, hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds don’t mix. The separation of fats and oils from water and water loving solutions makes using them in beer problematic. So recently we’ve been playing around with emulsifiers and, just like a weekly pay-check, they can encourage antagonistic entities to come together.
While texture in beer can be garnered from various mechanisms; like malts high in dextrins or glucans, mash temperature, salt balance, yeast selection and dry hop load, nothing really compares to cream. Seeking not only colloidal stability of oils in beer, but also advantageous flavour addition, we used both guar gum and xantham gum, in an Egg Nog stout, so we could combine condensed milk.
Emulsifiers are aliphatic compounds that have both hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts. In beer, the goal is to surround oil droplets with an emulsifier, creating an oil-in-water emulsion. The droplets get coated in a layer of emulsifier molecules, which then binds water from the other side. The result is a micelle, an individual droplet within a sea of hydrophilicity. Compile such micelles and you get a gel, rich in texture and flavour.
Our first shot at such an emulsion was a bit hit and miss. Getting the gums into solution is challenging, just as they are affected by pH and temperature. Mixing beer downstream is problematic, and the dissolved concentration of the gums hits saturation pretty quick. Maybe half of the 3% condensed milk still separated, so gum concentration is the focus moving forward. The resultant texture, however, is out of this world. Thick, rich and creamy.
Try it first in our 2025 Scrooged pack, launching sometime, who cares, I just want that pay-check.
Emulsifiers
