Following a year of successful trials Plater Bio is now manufacturing a natural ingredient that could revolutionise the real ale industry! The product is called chitosan and is extracted from specially cultured fungi. This radical development makes Plater Bio the only manufacturer of fungal chitosan outside of China. It is hoped that the new material will be taken up by the industry as a replacement for isinglass (AKA ‘fish guts’) as it is more effective and is suitable for vegan and organic uses. Dr Russell Sharp, Plater Bio Technical Director stated, “At Plater Bio we are very excited about the benefits of this revolutionary product. Initial trials have shown that fungal chitosan is a far more powerful flocculant than crab chitosan for clarifying real ale. We have worked with unclarified samples of beer from Pot Belly Brewery in Kettering and the results have been excellent.” Unlike the vast majority of chitosan, which is imported from Asia, Plater Bio’s chitosan is not made from prawn heads and crab shells. This makes the new material suitable for applications where animal waste is prohibited or where ingredients need to be vegan/halal/ kosher. Plater Bio’s Fungal Chitosan is also REACH regulation exempt as it is a natural polysaccharide. This substance’s additional uses include removing humates and other contaminants in water treatment and protecting crops from fungi and bacterial diseases. In fact, the product was initially developed as an agricultural biostimulant and only later was its flocculant activity discovered by the Plater Bio Research and Development team. Turbo Yeast was invented and brought to market by SPL International founder Philip Jones over 20 years ago, and despite being entrusted by some of the world’s leading alcoholic drinks producers internationally, to many in the industry they’re still largely an unknown. So what is a Turbo Yeast? They are products that combine active dried brewers, distillers or wine makers yeast strains with nutrition complexes, specifically developed for various fermentation conditions and alcohol product outputs. They combine yeast and nutrition in one product for improved yeast performance and added convenience for brewers when dosing. The areas Turbo Yeasts typically excel over other yeast products are in fermentation speed, temperature tolerance, consistency, alcohol purity and yield. The yeast strains used in each Turbo are key to this; they have been specifically selected by SPL, isolated and dried to their exacting specifications. This ensures not only that they are highly viable but that they are perfectly suited to their unique, complex, nutritional formulations. Some Turbos contain up to 28 different nutritional elements that help the yeast withstand various stress factors, maintain healthy Ph and perform optimally throughout fermentation. The most widely used Turbo Yeast products TY48® & TY24 are generally utilised by manufacturers to ferment low nutrition substrates such as sucrose and dextrose, though there are also Turbo products suited to fermenting potato, molasses, grain, various fruits and other sugar substrates. Predominantly alcoholic drinks producers are using Turbos to create a high alcohol neutral wash that can be flavoured to make liqueurs, diluted and flavoured to produce a variety of RTD products (flavoured malt beverages, hard sodas, pre-mixed cocktails & more) or distilled and flavoured for spirit making applications. The alcohol produced using a Turbo Yeast such as TY48® can provide a notable quality improvement in your end drink; having a more natural, smooth, fuller flavour than if GNS is used. Tom Jones, from Halewood Wines and Spirits, comments that “SPL’s TY48 product has allowed us to produce high quality alcohol in shorter fermentation times, this means we’re getting more yield from our fermenters, saving time and money.” 70 BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS www.spl-int.com For more information visit: www.platergroup.co.uk For more information visit: Shedding light on Turbo Yeast New ‘vegan’ flocculant could revolutionise real ale clarification Dr Russell Sharp inspecting the first batch of beer clarified with fungal chitosan News INGREDIENTS 70_Layout 1 10/11/2017 16:20 Page 1