Sonication in Beer Making

Beer making is a labor of love. If your last name is Budweiser, and you want to make beer that tastes like Budweiser, use your speed-em-up apparatus.

If your name, however, is oh say gerdsmit or such, let nature do it's elegant work in it's own sweet time. I promise you, your beer won't taste like Budweiser.

How do I know about these divinations ? I make beer (and better) all the time as a hobby.

you will sell drink no beer.....before its time.

and I believe the patriach of Budweiser wasn't Mr Budweiser, it was Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch, hense Anheuser/Busch

I know, thats my favorite.

You better hope that Stinky Pete doesn't come across this thread.

Peering through rimmed bloodshot eyes, he would type a response with his cigarette stained fingers clearly displaying contempt for even thinking such a thing. Something along the line of...

OF COURSE do it! Anything that speeds up the fermentation process, thus <cough> increasing the quantity available for consumption, must be vigourously embraced! <wheeze splutter> Get to it, mate! So what if it won't work, give it a blinkin go.

You'll just make flat beer...this excerpt from someone experimenting with just such a device...

"We also tried "barrel aging" beer using the same approach as our liquor trials. The good news is, yes, you can barrel age beer. Even PBR! As you can tell, I'm very selective about my alcohol. Unfortunately, in the process of sonicating the beer, the Sonicprep effectively degassed it. Had we kept CO2 cartriges on-hand, this would have been easy to remedy. Unfortunately, we only had nitrous which doesn't produce the same acidic flavors. Was barrel aged PBR good? I'm not sure, honestly. Without blind-tasting it, carbonated, at the same temperature as a control, my personal bias creeps in and influences what I think I prefer. But, I believe it has promise.

I also decided to make beer using the Sonicprep. My thinking was this: traditionally, you dissolve the ingredients in a batch of beer by boiling them in water. But, the heat of boiling likely changes the flavor of the beer. If you could dissolve the ingredients and extract flavors without boiling, you'd have a fundamentally different beer. Perhaps it would be the whitest white beer ever! So, I poured a batch of Belgian-style ale ingredients and distilled water into a 5-gallon plastic bucket and started sonicating.

Unfortunately, the effective range of the Sonicprep tip is only a few inches, so it didn't circulate the beer ingredients as I hoped. The malt extract sank to the bottom and the fuggle floated on the top. Hmph.

Rather than give up (like a sane person might), I divided the 5-gallon batch into 1-liter mini-batches and processed them one-by-one. I added charred oak chips and sonicated the beer on full power for about 5 minutes per batch, then poured the batch through a strainer. Once I had reached the end of 5 gallons (which felt like days later) I added the yeast and let it do its thing. Again, without a control to compare to it's hard to render an objective judgment, but it's a good beer. There's a faint note of charred oak and the beer is light in color, but in no way "white" - the malt extract is quite dark and is responsible for most of the color in the beer. In any event, I got 5 gallons of a very drinkable beer that was never boiled. I'll call that a WIN."

http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2012/01/experimenting-with-the-polyscience-sonicprep-ultrasonic-homogenizer/

Cavitation by an ultrasonic transducer would probably not be suitable for what you intend to do: strip CO2 from the beer so as to favor the forward fermentation reaction. If you strip the CO2 by cavitation, oxygen will also evolve into the cavitation bubbles. Yeast need oxygen for fermentation.

Noncondensable gases in cavitation bubbles cushion the implosion of the water vapor, so it would be better to strip all dissolved noncondensable gases by a degassing process before ultrasonication so you could get the cell wall breaking that you want.

Here is an example of a device that has gas stripping upstream of cavitation: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7757866.pdf

i think you should spend a while in one of the trappist monasteries in Belgium. Perhaps near Gent. Perhaps the best beer i ever tasted. Pity i never noted the name (if it had one), now that many Belgian beers are available in Bangalore.