Why Are Aseptic Techniques Important in Brewing?

If you are just learning about craft brewing and how to build the best brewery for your brew, you might have found yourself asking, “why are aseptic techniques important in brewing?”

After all, brewing has been around for more than 10,000 years at this point, and it is highly unusual for any beer to get contaminated to the point of making people sick.

So, what’s the big deal?

Let’s talk about it.

What Does Aseptic Mean?

First, let’s look at the term aseptic, which comes from the Greek root word for “not toxic.”

Aseptic environments are those that create a clean space where no harmful organisms can enter to make people sick.

Difference Between Aseptic and Sterile

Wait, isn’t that what sterile means?

No.

A sterilized environment is one in which no life can be created or thrive.

You can introduce sterilized equipment to an aseptic environment, but you don’t want an entirely sterilized environment in brewing because you are actually encouraging life to thrive.

Remember, the primary, unwavering ingredient in beer is yeast, and yeast is a living organism.

You want your yeast happy, healthy, and very much alive.

A sterile environment in brewing would be one in which the beer is under constant boil or airtight conditions, which you simply cannot have with beer.

Yeast needs some level of oxidation, that is exposure to oxygen, which means exposure to possible contaminants in the air, like other yeasts or bacteria.

An aseptic environment allows for that, for tiny life forms to potentially exist in this space.

The idea is just to ensure as little exposure as possible.

Basically, we want to create a space for brewing that is clean enough not to overload our beer with unwanted harmful organisms or toxins but also to be open enough that the living organisms we introduce can thrive, ferment, and create a brew to crave.

Why Aseptic Techniques Are Important in Brewing

But, if you can’t get sick from beer, who cares?

Why would you have to go to any lengths to ensure a non-toxic, or aseptic, environment for a product that essentially creates its own non-toxic environment?

It’s true.

Making beer is a simple process, obviously, and one that has remained pretty true to its original form since the beginning of brewing.

You see, around the time of the agricultural revolution, as humans began to realize they could make a much better living, and live much longer, by simply setting down roots, building permanent shelters, redirecting water sources, irrigating feels, and domesticating animals, they also discovered beer.

We use the term discovered, because there is really not much to invent.

Sure, it is a bit more complicated than wine, but not by much.

With wine, you can simply crush grapes and then let local yeast ferment your juice until you have wine.

With beer, you crush grain and boil it, and then do the same thing – let local yeast ferment this grain tea of sorts.

Sure, you can also toast the grain and add hops, but it really does not have to be complex.

And for millennia, it hasn’t been.

You just don’t hear about people getting sick from “bad beer.”

Most brewers worked from home, were usually women who did the bulk of the domestic work like cooking, cleaning, and indeed brewing, and the environment was far from aseptic.

This is not to say the environment was not clean, but it certainly was not hyper-sanitized.

However, domestic brewers, and even small pub owners who came later and brewed for their clientele, were typically working with a few barrels of beer at a time.

As such, if an unplanned for yeast or bacteria got into the brew and, say, turned it sour, added buttered popcorn flavors, or even notes of baby vomit (yes, that’s a thing), the batch could be tossed out.

Sure, it wasn’t ideal to lose a batch of brew, but you would not be throwing out thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of beer all thanks to the introduction of an unwanted living organism.

So really, the issue of creating an aseptic environment for brewing is not about not getting people sick as that scenario is highly unlikely. Thanks to the low pH and the high alcohol in beer, organisms that could make you sick cannot survive in beer.

It is, instead, about not creating a bad batch that you will have to throw out.

No customer is going to be sold on the latest batch of baby vomit flavored beer.

Aseptic Techniques to Implement Now

The goal, then, is to create an environment that will not welcome those unwanted yeasts and bacterium that are ever present.

Any brewing environment has the potential to encourage unwanted toxins to grow, particularly in a brewing space where brewing and fermentation are done in the same room. You can find yeast, bacteria, and other organisms in the air, in water, in dust, in sewers, in pests, and even in the everyday traffic that comes in and out of your space.

To control for these potential contaminants, it is highly advisable to sanitize your work environment, sanitize all brewing equipment regularly, frequently check lines for cracks and scratches, which invite contaminants to rest within, and to wear sterile lab clothing like a coat, gloves, a haircap, and goggles.

The more measures you can take to prevent contamination in your beer the better.

It is a good idea, if you have the space, to keep the mash-in room and the fermentation room separate as well.

Why?

Well, contamination is not such a huge deal before the boil because anything that does find its ways into your grain and water will simply be boiled off.

But once you cool your wort down, you are inviting a wealth of contaminants if you do not keep the brew in either an airtight container or ensure the fermentation has begun and forms that airtight bubble the krausening and the CO2 will create during fermentation.

Creating the ideal aseptic space for your brewing process is truly an art in experimentation.

Cheers!

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