Durham College’s (DC) Office of Research Services, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ORSIE) is pleased to announce it is receiving $133,000 in applied research funding via an Applied Research Tools and Instruments grant. Awarded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the grant is administered through the council’s College and Community Innovation Program and will be used to purchase a beer analysis system for the college’s Centre for Craft Brewing Innovation (CCBI).

Working alongside the CCBI’s existing Brew Lab and Brew Line, this basic version of a pressurized beer analyzing system, plus a dissolved oxygen module, will help researchers and consultants determine the core parameters of a beer, including alcohol content, original extract, real extract, degree of fermentation and dissolved oxygen from a single sample.

It will be used for applied research projects with craft brewers so they can better understand how their brewing processes function, allowing them to develop and implement improved control strategies, which in turn, results in a consistent, higher-quality brew.

The equipment, which is being supplied by Anton Paar, a well-known manufacturer of high-quality high-accuracy lab instruments that find many applications in the food and beverage industry, is able to automatically carry out the analysis of various key parameters in parallel on a single sample. It can also correct sample filling errors, cross correct results to improve accuracy and self-calibrate against distilled water, making the analysis system an industry standard.

The purchase of the new equipment, sees the CCBI join the ranks of the LCBO, as well as many larger breweries, all of whom have adopted the same system for their labs due to its superior reliability, ease of use and speed of analysis.