Recent Major Beverage Trends’ Evolution

Tackling Beverage Stability by Measuring Ring Formation

Microtrac provides solutions and products that can help companies achieve the highest quality. Specifically, the Turbiscan range offers solutions to develop, optimize, and control the stability, homogeneity, and shelf-life of drinks and beverages.

One of them is evaluating healthier weighting agent alternatives to stabilize beverage emulsions. Finished beverages like fruit juices are made by diluting concentrated beverage emulsions with weighting agents like brominated vegetable oil (BVO), leading to very unstable dilutions.

By removing classical weighting agents, manufacturers are working to stop the deterioration process of unstable dilutions, which create a ring formation around the neck of the beverage container, also known as creaming. The process of ring formation is a powerful indicator of beverage emulsion stability. Microtrac proposes a method to assess the efficiency of a new natural weighting agent and find an optimum concentration that delays deterioration and formation of the ring, improving ring formation kinetics.

For this article, we focus on vegetable oil and studies of this healthier weighting agent, which also resulted in a final ring size comparable to the currently used BVO weighting agent, making it an effective and suitable alternative. These results from measurements with Turbiscan SMLS technology provide a solution for stabilizing beverages. The method proposed by Microtrac helps reduce the time needed to evaluate shelf-life and phenomena by months (up to 1,000 times faster than standard methods).

Optimizing the clarification process of wine, soft drinks, and beer

Clarification of beverages like wine and beer is also crucial for ensuring quality production. In collaboration with the French Institute of Wine Research, we conducted a comparative evaluation of the efficiency of two vegetal proteins used to clarify red wine. These fining agents are essential to encourage the sedimentation of particles and reduce the number of filtration cycles needed to achieve a wine’s desired brightness and stability. The study found the optimal vegetable protein and concentration for wine fining by using TURBISCAN technology, which allows for the quantification of migration rates and determination of sediment layer height. While milk and vegetable milk are not a topic for this article, it is important to note the diverse applications beverage research has on the industry and its many drinks.

This non-invasive evaluation of protein efficiency for wine clarification holds promise for high-quality wine producers, showing that a medium-concentration fining agent initiates sedimentation sooner and the sediment layer thickness is comparable to that of a high concentration agent.

Regarding soft drinks, TURBISCAN works with both concentrated and diluted samples. One of the main problems with soft drink formulation is the ‘stabilizers’ available for food-grade drinks. Two primary stabilizers, including Arabic gum, are natural and therefore composition depends on harvest quality and weather. As innovation progresses, alternatives are being considered, though these have yet to meet the effectiveness of the gum. We are working to address these challenges using advanced technology and research methods.

Improvements to beverage clarification are not limited to wine and soft drinks. Using TURBISCAN technology, we conducted experiments to compare the effects of temperature on the rate of wort clarification which is key in the beer-making process. Heat allows impurities to coagulate on the wort, a sweet liquid from malt. The experiments supported the parallel relationship between increased temperature and increased rate of clarification, an important step in determining the sediment formation speed in beer.