In this lesson, I would like to look at the various factors that influence foam stability and all the stages in the process. What can happen there to either benefit the foam or detract from foam quality. I'd like to start by looking at some of the grist materials. I like to show you an experiment that was done by another former students of mine, Alex Coomb. Alex, I charged him with a task of looking into the theory that Lawrence Bishop had had. If you cast your minds back, I said that Lawrence Bishop draw the conclusion that when you kill malt strongly or you heavily roast the grain, then you cook together proteins and carbohydrates and they are better at foam stabilizing. I said to Alex, go away and find out why that is. I don't know if we got him coming back into my office with his head slightly hung low, and I said, how is it, Alex? He muttered a bit. He said not all of the specialty malts improve foam stability. What he'd done is to take a range of grist materials and basically mash them. He extracted the proteins from them in a mashing protocol. He measured the foam stability using that shaking method that Greg Kappa developed. The malt was the pale to remote was okay. It was a little bit better than the barley but not much different. Wheat malt was better, and of course, for many years, people have had that rule. If you want to improve the foam, get some wheat in there because the proteins on wheat, molecule for molecule are better than those from barley. But what people have said for the longest time was that things like crystal malts and caramel malts were good for foam stability. What Alex found was, if you extract them, they're not, in fact, some of them are downright poor. This flew in the face of received wisdom. People say you want to improve the foam, some specialty malts will help. Now, earlier on we talked about melanoidins and mayyad reaction products that foam stability. That potentially is going to improve the foam. But something happens that Alex demonstrated time and again, which generate foam negativity in some of these materials. Now, if you go to the chocolate malts and the black malts and the roast barley, they're very good, absolutely, they really are very good. But you know, if you're making a pale, gently flavored, gently colored lager beer, black malt ain't helpful. What is it about these things? Does it transcribe into brewing practice? In this experiment, what we did was to make some brews and the one-and-a-half barrel brewery at UC Davis, a famous Aggie's Ale. We did it with 100% pale malt. We did it with two different crystal malts, 75L and 120L. Now, if you look at the original experiment that Alex did, then 75L had worse foam ability than 120L. But when you make beers from them, we confirm that the crystal malt lowered the foam stability assessed by the Rudin method, but actually 120L was worse than the 75L. What's happening here? Let me tell you something else that feeds into the explanation. That is a significantly sized craft brewery in Northern California decided they were going to take the crystal malt out of their brews as a result of what we found. They got excess foaming actually in the brewery. The foaming that was taking place in the brewing operation was more. Now, again, anybody will tell you that the more foaming you have in the process, the less good it is for the foaming on the finished beer. I think what is happening in this experiment is two things. I think we've got the foam negative that is coming through but also I think the biggest is more foam negative in the 75L. It's actually doing two things. It's contributing to the negativity in the finished product but it's actually meaning less foam loss during the process. It's a two-edged sword. It may be, in certain circumstances, that these types of malts do improve the finished foam stability because they're suppressing foam during fermentation, there's more positive going into the finished product, but as only if the foam negative that they're contributing is being removed. Then you might even get better foam stability. But the fundamental fact is there are foam negative materials in these malts. What are they? We find that they are so-called oxidized lipids. They are lipids. These are ones that have become oxidized. I'll come back to that later. In fact, I'll come back to that right now. In the grain, there are fatty acids. The most important fatty acid is something called linoleic acid. It's an unsaturated fatty acid. You've probably heard all about unsaturated fatty acids. They're better for you than saturated fatty acids in the diet. Well, unsaturated fatty acids and the fatty acid consist a lot of these carbon atoms, and an acid group at the end is the acid group that has got the charge, that means that it can interact with water; coming back to what I talked about earlier on. Now, the Number 1 unsaturated fatty acid in barley is linoleic acid, has got 18 carbon atoms. It's a very hydrophobic entity. It's got what we call double bonds, and this is the unsaturated nature of it. Some of the carbon atoms are linked by two bonds rather than one. All you need to know is they are susceptible to oxidation to make oxidized fatty acids. Now, oxidized fatty acids are a little bit more soluble than the unsaturated fatty acids, and they are also demonstrably foam negative. If you oxidize an unsaturated fatty acid, you will produce a foam negative material. Now, this can happen non enzymatically into the words just chemically but it can also happen due to the action of an enzyme. This enzyme is called lipoxygenase. People have looked at this enzyme a lot in the context of the styling of beer and in the course on freshness, I'll say a lot about lipoxygenase. But lipoxygenase is present, is produced during malting, and it is capable of oxidizing these unsaturated fatty acids. We believe this enzyme is doing its job to an even greater extent in the production of some of these caramelized malts in the stewing phase when they are being made.