Author: Marshall Schott

I’ve never been one to give much of a shit about aesthetics. Vanity is vice, in my world. When it comes to food and drink, though, I tend to agree with the old saying, we taste with our eyes first. Admitting this comes not without a fair bit of shame, mind you. It’s true that for many beer lovers, a nice cap of foam resting atop their beer and the residual lace left gripping the glass after taking a sip is something highly desired. I’m not sure anyone would argue that head retention and lacing are directly related to good flavor, but that doesn’t stop most of us from seeking it.

If foam and lace are what you seek, the first place to start is recipe design. We know that certain malts such as CaraPils or using heaps of hops tend to contribute to head retention, while beers falling on either extreme of the ABV scale tend to suffer in the foam department. With that in mind, let’s assume you’ve got a beautiful 6.5% ABV IPA, hopped to holy hell with CaraPils as 5% of the grist, ready to drink. You pour your first bottle or take your first pull from the keg, it’s looking just right, then within seconds the foam disappears. You throw back a few gulps and nothing is left sticking to inside of the glass. Assuming your process was sound, there’s a high likelihood the problem lies not in the beer itself, but the glassware. More precisely, the chemicals you used to clean your glassware may be to blame for your feeble foam.

With some free time on my hands, I set up an exBEERiment (different than an experiment in that it’s not all that official or precise and usually involves the consumption of moderate amounts of alcohol) in which I compared head retention and lacing in glasses “cleaned” with what I believe to be the more commonly used chemicals in the homebrewer’s repertoire:

OxiClean Free

Dawn Liquid Dish Soap

StarSan (I know, not a cleanser)

Hot Water + Cold Rinse

I made an OxiClean Free solution using very hot water then let the glass soak for 5 minutes before removing it and giving it a good hot rinse. The Dawn glass was scrubbed with my clean hand then rinsed for 30 seconds in very hot tap water. The StarSan glass was soaked in a typical solution for 5 minutes and was not rinsed after being removed. The final glass was brand new and had never been washed, I simply hit it with hot water for 45 seconds then rinsed it with cold water until the glass felt cool. All 4 glasses were left to drip dry in a dish rack prior to being filled.

I filled each glass with a tasty Cream Ale within 15 seconds, start to finish.

The differences were noticeable immediately.

A few interesting things you might notice in the photo above is how the beer in the glasses cleaned with OxiClean and Dawn appear mostly still, the beer in the glass soaked in StarSan has a a good amount of bubbles coming from the bottom, and the glass rinsed with hot/cold water has small bubbles clinging to the side.

From another angle, it’s clear to see the foam is acting quite differently in each glass.

After disposing… ahem… of half of the beer in each glass, the differences between each glass became much more apparent.

I was actually surprised the glass cleaned with Dawn had any lacing at all given the amount of pooh-poohing it receives from folks.

I drank the rest of the beer in each glass to get a more objective, scientific perspective.

The results were interesting, to say the least. My initial hunch was that the OxiClean glass would do the best, but really it did about the same as the glasses rinsed with Dawn and water alone. When I initially shared these results, one homebrewing chemist offered the following explanation for what likely led to these results:

“What is happening is the way dish soap works is by utilizing dispersants and surfactants to effectively make water ‘wetter’ by altering the polarity of water molecules and grease (lipids) to lift grease and dirt from the glass. If not properly washed away, these surfactants can leave a residue on the glassware that repel the lipids and protein in the beer’s head, thus no head retention. As far as the StarSan glass having the greatest head retention and lacing, it is due to the inherent nature of StarSan being acidic (around 3 pH) and lightly etching the glass which creates nucleation points for dissolved CO2 to be released and for the sugars and proteins to latch onto as lacing.”

It should be noted this was a rather controversial explanation and that other folks strongly disagreed with him. While I did my best to ensure the glasses soaked in Dawn and OxiClean were well rinsed, perhaps there was still some residual surfactant. In the time since I performed this exBEERiment, I’ve regularly rinsed my glasses following use then threw them in a bucket of StarSan solution, sometimes overnight. Foam and lacing issues are essentially a thing of the past for me.

A quick word of caution to those considering using StarSan for this purpose:

StarSan is an acid that will eventually dissolve most screen printing on glasses!

If you care about the images on your glasses, don’t leave them in the StarSan solution too long. And remember, StarSan is not a cleanser, hence I recommend you give your glasses a good cleansing with hot water after each use and before soaking them in StarSan.

Cheers!

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