Removing tannins and debittering brewer’s spent yeasts by Tween 80

Introduction: Yeast extract from brewer's spent yeast cells is a promising nutrition source for many applications in the food industry and biomass production. However, because of the impurities that cause the bitter and astringent flavor attributed to hop resins during fermentation, brewer's spent yeasts in the industry have not been widely used. Contaminants have been withdrawn by using a variety of techniques. However, most reported methods have focused on removing iso-alpha acid rather than tannin, which has anti-digestive and antimicrobial properties. This study focuses on removing tannins and evaluating their impact on reusing brewer's spent yeast in biomass production. Methods: In this work, Tween 80 was employed for the removal of tannins and other bitter substances from brewer’s spent yeasts. In addition to biochemical approaches, the efficiency of cultivating probiotics with autolysates from yeasts cleaned by various buffers is used to evaluate the effectiveness of eliminating tannins and bitter compounds. Results: In tannin removal, the outstanding efficiency of Tween 80 was four times higher than that of water and hypotonic 0.5% NaCl solution. The debittering efficiency increases from 77% to 83.6% by using Tween 80. Therefore, the cell density of Lactobacillus fermentum 4C cultures with the autolysate from Tween 80-treated spent yeast cells increased by 16.5% and 10.2% compared to that of cultures washed with distilled water or 0.5% NaCl, respectively. The autolysate of Tween 80-treated yeast cells is rich in protein and α-amino nitrogen. It shows advantages in culturing different strains of probiotics. Conclusions: By skipping the first stage of biomass creation, the reuse of spent yeasts in the production of yeast extracts will not only address environmental issues but also have a positive economic impact.