R&D Chef Dimitris Kontoratos instructor of the Gourmet classes at Anko with years of experience and highly specialized explains whether beer contains fungus or not.
As the chef analyses every packaged food has a label on which all the ingredients it contains are listed. The same happens with our beloved beer where we characteristically read at the back of the bottle, INGREDIENTS: ‘water, malt, hops, yeast…’
Beer for many is the ‘nectar or juice’ of cereals. By using good quality water, we abstract the sugars from the barley. With the help of saccharomyce the sugar which they contain is metabolized and alcohol, carbon dioxide (carbonate) is produced. This is done within a specific period of time depending on the type of beer and then it is kept in cooling tanks until it is ripe.
After that period of time the beer is filtered in order to remove the last cell of yeast and then clear, without a trace of yeast, it is bottled.
So, we ascertain that beer does not contain yeast. As a product of fermentation it constitutes a basic raw material but not an ingredient of the final product.
Nowadays, it is a new trend to have unfiltered or even pasteurized beers. Therefore we encounter unfiltered beers with yeast residues, pasteurized without living yeast cells and the non-pasteurized with some non-pathogenic microorganisms which may be beneficial to our health. The unfiltered beer can be blurry and have organoleptic characteristics depending on the production period and the storage conditions. In any case the beer sector is booming with a lot of fans, producers and worshippers who produce this very special and very old drink by themselves for their personal use.