Glossary
Pasteurisation
Heating packaged or in-line beer enough to kill spoilage organisms and yeast, greatly extending shelf stability.
Also called pasteurization, pasteurised, tunnel pasteurisation, flash pasteurisation.
The full record
Pasteurisation has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Pasteurisation — Heat beer enough to kill yeast and spoilage organisms, greatly extending microbiological stability across a long supply chain.
Tunnel pasteurisation heats sealed packages; flash pasteurisation heats beer briefly in-line before filling. Both stop the beer changing microbiologically, which is why mass-market lager keeps consistently across long supply chains.
The cost is a small but detectable flattening of flavour, and the loss of any possibility of package conditioning. Cask ale is never pasteurised, because the live secondary fermentation is the point of it.
Related
- Cask conditioning — The tradition pasteurisation is incompatible with.
- Real ale — A definition that excludes pasteurised beer.
More vocabulary
Arrested fermentation · Barrel ageing · Batch sparging · Biotransformation · Blending · Bottle conditioning · Bottom fermentation · Burtonisation · Cask conditioning · Centrifugation
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.