1-10. What are "cold-filtered", and "heat pasteurized" beers?
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This article is from the rec.food.drink.beer FAQ, by John Lock with numerous contributions by others.
1-10. What are "cold-filtered", and "heat pasteurized" beers?
Cold-filtering is a way of clarifying beer with a shortened lagering
time. Beer (lager particularly) becomes clearer with extended storage
which allows proteins and other particles to coagulate and settle out
of suspension. The beer can then be drawn off and bottled. One way to
reduce the time required is to chill the beer causing these molecules
to "clump" and be easily filtered out. The up-side is that the time
from brewing to finished product is shortened, thereby boosting
productivity. The down-side is that cold-filtering also removes many
components which contribute flavor and body to beer.
Heat Pasteurized is a redundant phrase since pasteurization means
heating to kill microbes.
Some beers are bottle or cask conditioned, meaning that live yeast
are still in the beer in its container. Most mainstream beers are
either filtered, to remove all yeast and bacteria, or pasteurized to
kill all yeast and bacteria. This makes for a more stable product
with a longer shelf-life.
Pasteurization is more expensive and tends to alter the flavor.
Filtration is cheaper, leaves a clearer beer, and has less effect on
flavor.
The "ice" beer process (see above) enhances filtration schemes
because more stuff can be filtered out more quickly using less
filtration material which shows up directly on the old bottom line.
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