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Weird Science: Danish researchers make non-alcoholic beer taste like regular beer

[Credit: Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash]

 

 

Even though sales of non-alcoholic beer have risen substantially in Denmark and Europe in the last couple of years, many people find the taste is not as good as regular beer.

Some people find the taste to be flat and watery, and this has a natural explanation, according to Sotirios Kampranis, a professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

"What non-alcoholic beer lacks is the aroma from hops. When you remove the alcohol from the beer, for example by heating it up, you also kill the aroma that comes from hops. Other methods for making alcohol-free beer by minimizing fermentation also lead to poor aroma because alcohol is needed for hops to pass their unique flavor to the beer," Kampranis says.

But now, Kampranis and his colleague Simon Dusseaux, both founders of the biotech company EvodiaBio, think they have cracked the code of how to make non-alcoholic beer that is full of hop aroma.

"After years of research, we have found a way to produce a group of small molecules called monoterpenoids, which provide the 'hoppy' flavor, and then add them to the beer at the end of the brewing process to give it back its lost flavor. No one has been able to do this before, so it's a game-changer for non-alcoholic beer," says Kampranis.

A sample of the researchers' flavor molecules, which can give non-alcoholic beer it's hoppy flavor. [Credit: Photo by Simon Dusseaux]

 

 

Instead of adding expensive aroma hops in the brewing tank, just to "throw away" their flavor at the end of the process, the researchers have turned baker's yeast cells into micro factories that make the monoterpenoids. The yeast can be grown in fermenters.

"When the hop aroma molecules are released from yeast, we collect them and put them into the beer, giving back the taste of regular beer that so many of us know and love. It actually makes the use of aroma hops in brewing redundant, because we only need the molecules passing on the scent and flavor and not the actual hops," says Kampranis.

On top of improving the taste of non-alcoholic beer, the method is also far more sustainable than the existing techniques, according to the researchers. First of all, aroma hops are mainly farmed in the West Coast of the United States, which requires extensive transportation and also the cooling down of the crops in refrigerators. Secondly, growing hops demands lots of water. Altogether, this is not a very climate-friendly production process.

"With our method, we skip aroma hops altogether and thereby also the water and the transportation. This means that one kilogram of hops aroma can be produced with more than 10 times less water and more than 100 times less CO2," says Kampranis.

"Long term, we hope to change the brewing industry with our method -- also the production of regular beer, where the use of aroma hops is also very wasteful," says Kampranis.

The method is already being tested in breweries in Denmark, and the plan is to have the technique ready for the entire brewing industry by October 2022.

The researchers chronicle their process in a newly published study in Nature.

Source: University of Copenhagen

Published February 2022

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