Beer Thoughts

Once seen as a key differentiation between better and mass marketed beer, the 2-row barley malt may now be the least important ingredient in a brewery.  Malt has disappeared from our beer conversations.  There are still palettes stacked high with 50 lb bags, and fork lifts. By weight, it's still beer's second largest ingredient, after water of course.  However it's lost our attention, and its contributions intentionally minimized to better showcase on the other players - most typically hops and Yeast (or other microflora). The mighty hop has always been a lead character in American craft beer.  There's something in our soil that makes hops express pungent aromas and aggressive flavors.  European brewers traditionally considered these hops too vulgar to feature prominently in a beer's finish.  They kept quiet about cost savings from the use of american hops to bitter.  American craft brewers found ways to feature these piney, resinous flavors as virt...

Brewer's yeast has been modified to make both alcohol, and hop aromas by researchers at Berkeley and the US Department of Energy's Joint Bioenergy Lab .  Charles Denby, Rachel Li, Jay Keasling and a number of collaborators recently published a paper in Nature Communications. They describe a technique to modify brewers yeast to express two molecules known to contribute hop flavor and aroma.  The paper provides an analysis of the relative expression of these compounds, as well as the yeast's fermentation efficiency.  Quite remarkably, the authors report the results of a tasting panel trained by Lagunitas Brewing Company to assess beer flavors in ~10 gallon batches of beer.  Should we call it home brew?  Lab brew?  Sci-brew? If I had any idea that beer tasting notes could be publishable in a Nature journal , I would have considered more strongly a career in academia . Yeast Cells - by Scanning Electron Microscope As cool as all this is, what does i...