using extra virgin olive oil in beer fermentation

Do you home brew your beer, or know anyone who does?

Have you/they heard about using EVOO in beer fermentation instead of oxygen?

By adding a minute mount of EVOO to the starter or wort prior to fermentation, can increase the ester production and flavour stability of your beer.

What if you could do away with the headache of deciding how much oxygen to add, when to add it, and what is the best way to add it. Wouldn’t that simplify your lives as homebrewers? Not to mention the added benefit of improved aging and flavour stability.

One method which has gotten a lot of press lately and been circulating throughout the various forums is the addition of a miniscule amount of olive oil in beer yeast instead of oxygen. The idea goes like this. Yeast needs oxygen to produce sterols and unsaturated fatty acids (UFA) for their cell walls. If we supply the UFAs to the yeast, then they won’t need oxygen.

It was found that the beers fermented with olive oil had increased ester content, although the increase was not out of specs for the beers produced (in the New Belgium brewery where the tests were conducted). Other results were that fermentations were a little slower but they did finish at the same gravities as those that were oxygenated instead. Perhaps the best result for big breweries and us as homebrewers, was that normal fermentations can be achieved with improved flavour stability.

So how much olive oil in beer yeast should you be using? During the trials, New Belgium brewery would pitch 4500 litres of yeast into 168000 litres of beer. Into the 4500 litres of yeast, they would add 300 ml of oil. To scale this down for 5 gallons, we need to use about 0.0000833 ml of oil. For almost everyone, this is impossible to measure. There are 60 drops of olive oil in a teaspoon, and a teaspoon is 5 ml, so a drop is about 0.0833 ml. You would need about 0.001 or 1/1000 of a drop. As you can see, the amounts are minuscule. It was suggested on Northern Brewer’s forum that one way to get this small amount would be to dip a toothpick into the olive oil and then transfer this amount over to the wort. Sounds good to me, and I believe many homebrewers are using this method to get the right amount in their wort.
So, for the adventurous homebrewers out there, try it. I believe it has been documented and experimented enough by everyone to be safe and reliable means of increasing both the flavour stability and ester production in your beers.
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So – grab a bottle of Isobel Olives Extra Virgin Olive oil for your next home brew production and try it out. As you need so little, use the rest in your kitchen for your baking, roasting, salads, and enjoy the taste of good health made with passion..