Meet Legendary Brewmaster, Chuck Hahn
This week, our We Know Melbourne writer, Nick Phillips sat down with legendary brewmaster Chuck Hahn ahead of The Swanston Hotel’s, For the Love of Beer event on September 15. I used to work on the production line at CUB’s Abbotsford brewery before it all became automated. The ‘old timers’ there would always sneak us a few bottles of beer before it went through the pasteuriser. In my memory it tasted much better than the unpasteurised beer. Is my memory playing tricks on me or do you think pasteurising changes the taste? Fresh beer is best. Properly managed, tunnel or flash pasteurisation should not be detrimental to final beer flavour. However, if the beer contains too much oxygen due to improper processing, when it is heated up, it will become slightly oxidised with stale (almost papery) flavours. At Hahn Brewing Company, we pioneered the process called “cold sterile filtration”. The beer was filtered through a sterile filter at cold temperatures in the final process to stabilise the beer. However, a number of years ago, we went …
