I’ve seen some posts about emulsions and we’ve started playing around with making beers here in the UK with our full-spectrum oil.
We’ve been running tests with Lecithin and polysorbate 80 mixture which has been successful but we have noticed that the taste is incredibly bitter. We can balance out the flavour but ideally we would want to use a less bitter surfactant, does anyone have experience which surfactants can be used? Has anyone ever used ever used Kolliphor® RH 40 - and had experience in making a stable emulsion?
The oil we are currently using is an MCT but we plan to change into an LCT.
No worries, I’ll send you a copy if they get it to me!
In the mean time, is there a value I should be comparing besides HLB for going polysorbate to q-Naturale? Or a general ratio of oil to surfactant for translucent emulsions?
There is a suggested ratio but it’s unique to the emulsifier. I don’t know what it is for q Nat because I lost the sheet. I think it was 3:1 maybe? What are you using?
I had good results today with just Q-naturale and distillate. I did 4:1 by weight Q-naturale:distillate as you suggested. The Q-naturale is actually only 14% saponin and the rest is water, so the amount of Q-naturale solution I had to use was quite large - it came out to about 27% by weight. Does this seem right? It seems to be significantly more surfactant than is recommended by Ingredion in their white paper, but it did produce a translucent result. Their white paper would suggest that I can use 2% Q-naturale to 8% oil… when I tried doubling the amount of oil, I produced a milky product again.
Well I’m glad you’re making progress. And it does taste better doesn’t it. I mean making clear emulsions can be tricky. And just because it’s not clear doesn’t mean it’s not stable. After all orange crush is cloudy and it stays good for decades.
Oh yeah, it’s awesome… a little bitter, but nothing compared to PS80.
So if it isn’t translucent, that means the particles are >250 nm, right? So how can I sterile filter it without losing product then? Sterile filtration requires 220nm filter if I’m not mistaken.
“The dispersed phase typically comprises small particles or droplets, with a size range of 5 nm-200 nm, and has very low oil/water interfacial tension. Because the droplet size is less than 25% of the wavelength of visible light, Nanoemulsions are transparent.”
Violet has the lowest wavelength in the visible spectrum, and its wavelength is 380 nm. 25% of that is 95 nm, for example. Red is at 750 nm, so 25% of that is 188 nm, so anything below about 250 nm will be translucent.
