Small Scale
Fermentation – The Trial Run
In lectures we have moved onto something that I really do
find interesting and I one of the main reasons I chose the module, the
bioreactor. With an eye on a future job in the brewing industry I was curious
as to how my experience of fermenting tanks and holding tanks compared with
what was taught in lectures. The information was actually very useful and didn’t
always conform to what I believed to be the “correct way” which was
interesting.
We had made one final change to our product before small
scale production started. It will now be a kefir water product, compared to a
milk product. In the research that we were conducting on GI diseases it turned
out that many people who suffer also suffer from Lactose intolerance. This would
have made the product redundant to them.
So far small scale fermentation had been going to plan, in
that Aidan had started it at home and the grains seemed to be thriving in a
5-10% sugar solution. We had found in the research that glass was the best
material to carry out the fermentation because it won’t in any way react with
the grains and it seemed to be working when placed in glass jars, so all was
going to plan.
In our project, thankfully we hadn’t progressed our project
far enough to include a bioreactor and this lecture came just in time to help
us form an opinion and spark a few heated debates, the first of many. Because
of our back ground in food science we obviously had a particular interest in
the taste side of the product, but also the safety and viability of the
product. This is where disagreement number one came about. I had an issue with
the safety of a product that merely has just a teacloth stretched across it,
considering that in lectures we had just covered the very obvious topic of
contamination. But on the other hand it was argued that with the nature of
kefir grains being microorganisms themselves that they would be immune to this
contamination. It was decided that a much more advanced piece of material would
be used as cover for the fermenting jars and that the liquid would be filtered
at the end of the process.
Does it work? Can Kefir water be produced? Does
it contain probiotics? Are the logistics feasible on a small scale, so they can
be ramped up to large scale? What’s nee
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