Foster's Group is a premium, global, multi-beverage company delivering a total portfolio of beer, wine, spirits, cider and non-alcohol beverages. Carleton and United Beverages (CUB ), a division of Fosters, is a multi-beverage business in Australia. The focus of this article is on the Analytical Services Group at CUB, which is responsible for carrying out various types of analyses on beer.

The group makes extensive use of automated analytical systems, including several GC, GC/MS and HPLC systems to analyze beer, wine, soft drinks, mixed drinks and water. They recently added a Thermo Scientific LCQ™ to their arsenal of analytical instruments in order to help them carry out more definitive protein analysis. Until recently, they were relying extensively on HPLCs with Diode Array detectors to carry out most of their protein analyses.

On Sin, Manager of the Analytical Services Group at CUB, has been at the company for 15 years and has extensive experience working with GC and GC/MS systems. Robert Smillie has over 20 years experience in analytical chemistry. Before CUB he worked in the Melbourne University Biochemistry Department. He started his career 20 years ago using huge mass spectrometers for analyzing pesticides and truly appreciates the new, smaller bench-top systems.

“One of the major challenges in the Beer industry is haze formation often caused because of high temperatures and storage. The haze is caused by precipitation of the proteins in beer when they react with the polyphenols, also present in beer.” On Sin adds “Beer stability during storage and transportation is a main concern and the typical life of a beer can be anywhere from two months and three years. The key is to reduce the haze without affecting the head of the beer.”

“The long time industry standard for carrying out haze analysis is by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. Capturing the haze causing proteins by this hit-and-miss technique is like doing black magic” Robert Smillie explains. “So the challenge is to identify the proteins in beer responsible for the haze, so that they can be removed and the haze reduced”, On Sin concludes.

With the help of Kate Madin, a student at the University of Melbourne, they are planning to use the LCQ to address this challenge. They are confident that soon they will have developed methods to compare “treated” and “untreated” beers. “Treating” the beer with a variety of agents, like papaine, silica hydrogel, etc. helps reduce the total amount of protein and can reduce the haze. Their next project as On Sin says is to identify all the proteins in beer, and reach their long term goal of conquering the “beer proteome”. They plan to present their Beer Proteome discoveries at the relevant conferences in the near future.