What are “cold-filtered”, and “heat pasteurized” beers?
Cold-filtering is a way of clarifying beer with a shortened lagering time. Beer (lager particularly) becomes clearer with extended storage which allows proteins and other particles to coagulate and settle out of suspension. The beer can then be drawn off and bottled. One way to reduce the time required is to chill the beer causing these molecules to “clump” and be easily filtered out. The up-side is that the time from brewing to finished product is shortened, thereby boosting productivity. The down-side is that cold-filtering also removes many components which contribute flavor and body to beer. Heat Pasteurized is a redundant phrase since pasteurization means heating to kill microbes. Some beers are bottle or cask conditioned, meaning that live yeast are still in the beer in its container. Most mainstream beers are either filtered, to remove all yeast and bacteria, or pasteurized to kill all yeast and bacteria. This makes for a more stable product with a longer shelf-life. Pasteurizat
