Beer Thoughts

It's impossible for traditional crafts to exist in a vacuum, isolated from the innovations and discoveries of the modern world.  Brewing is no different.  It's a craft rejuvenated by home brewers returning to the traditions of the past, and entrepreneurs who followed their passions into a battle against Goliaths of commerce and misconception often romanticizing the individual artisan while celebrating the greatness created when the brewer's art embraced industry in Bohemia, Britain, and Germany.  The pace of scientific discovery and technological change has only hastened.  Today scientific discovery and technological improvements are influencing beer through its ingredients, brewing processes, and marketing. Technological changes to beer ingredients are both the most frightening, and the most exciting sources of science driven innovation available to the modern brewer. While a good beer may be transcend the qualities of its components, it's difficult to artfully ...

This week, Nature published a paper entitled " A physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome ".    Promotional Press releases were quick to link this achievement to potential crop improvements .  The London Press wasted no time in connecting the dots to beer .  "Improvements" are changes, and the craft beer community greets all changes with levels of skepticism that are, at a minimum, healthy.  Alan McLeod's Good Beer Blog saw the discovery as the beginning of sceince's impact on brewing, and was quick to expand the question of the relative benefit of genetically engineered barley crops into a broad challenge to science as a whole: Can Science Really Improve Beer As Known Now?   Science has contributed significantly to brewing throughout the history of the art, and provided the tools that allow us to best appreciate our ancestors beer styles and brewing techniques. Firstly, Science must be defined as an actor if it...