LAUSR

Abstract Craft beers have become an attractive investment because of the increase in terms of their sensorial qualities. One of the stages of beer production is the mashing, in which there is a high enzymatic action to convert the starch into fermentable sugars. This step is influenced by several parameters, such as temperature, pH, ground malt composition and dilution rate. The importance of modelling the mashing process of a craft brewery in kinetic terms poses as key factor for improving quality in this sector. This is because it allows to evaluate the main parameters that positively or negatively affect the craft beer process performance. Furthermore, it was developed a kinetic model in this study to represent the mashing process of a craft brewery in order to evaluate the behavior of the variables that influenced the malting process during the brewing stage. The experiments were carried out in this work by using a 34 full factorial design. The chosen parameters comprised pH, temperature, grain size, dilution and process time. The response variable was the Brix of the beer. A statistical analysis was performed and results showed that dilution rate, grain particle size, pH, temperature and process time were the variables with statistical significance. The ideal process time and dilution rate were above 20 min and low dilution rates. Kinetic parameters found were also K0 = 0.005224 min−1 and Ea = −8.814 kJ/kg.