For thousands of years, since the ancient Egyptians or Sumerians discovered beer, we didn’t add in carbon dioxide. It occurs naturally due to fermentation.
The best beers in the world, are Czech or German. They don’t add in CO2 beyond what occurs naturally during fermentation. Why do American beer makers need to do so??
That’s what I was thinking. It happens naturally.
“For thousands of years, since the ancient Egyptians or Sumerians discovered beer, we didn’t add in carbon dioxide. It occurs naturally due to fermentation.”
I keep fermented vegetables continuously brewing...
I’m not familiar with beer brewing... and to TBH, I am a little shocked to find out that beer has CO² injected into the process and not naturally occuring.
Lazy impatient brewer.
They don’t want the dead little yeasties accumulating in the bottom of the bottle or keg when they die. You see in simplified terms, the yeast eats the sugars. They turn it into alcohol and carbon dioxide as a by product and that’s where the bubbling, foaming effect comes from.
CO2 is needed in the canning, bottling, and kegging operations. Oxygen greatly reduces the shelf life of beer.
The big industrial brewers want efficiency and speed.
Natural fermentation in the bottle takes extra handling, storage space (Lager means “to store” in German) and time. Beer will will taste pretty green for at least a couple weeks while the little yeasties do their thing. This continues for a long time, I’ve naturally carbonated beers that are over a year old and they taste fantastic.
Comtamination with outside yeasts or bacteria, or overdosing on the “priming” means exploding bottles, too. I can see where Beer makers and vendors don’t want to mess with that. At all.