Belgisch lab wil bierbrouwwereld op zijn kop zetten met betere gisten

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Tapping genetics for better beer


_{Kevin Verstrepen (centre) leads a beer-tasting session in his lab at the University of Leuven in Belgium.}

Kevin Verstrepen’s lab meetings can be pretty boozy affairs. Twice a week, several members of his group at Belgium’s University of Leuven and the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology gather around a table loaded with black, tulip-shaped beer glasses, together with spit buckets and crackers.

Verstrepen holds a glass and takes a whiff of its contents. “For me, this was an ethyl acetate bomb,” he pronounces, referring to a chemical found in pear-flavoured sweets that, at high concentrations, reeks of nail polish.

Brigida Gallone, a graduate student in the lab, detects a second aroma: “ethyl acetate and 4-VG”, she says. That’s 4-vinyl-guaiacol, which smells of smoke, cloves and — according to a tasting sheet in front of her — a dentist’s surgery. “I like 4-VG and this was too much for me.” Another student, Stijn Mertens, catches a smell of wet cardboard, which is common to stale beers. “I got some trans-2-nonenal,” he says. With that, the group finishes its analysis of this brew and moves onto the ninth and final glass. It is not even 11 a.m..

“There’s only so many you can do before you lose focus,” says postdoc Miguel Roncoroni, who has been hosting these tastings for more than 4 months. They are part of a project to characterize some 200 commercially produced Belgian beers. Their assessments, alongside precise measurements of the dozens of chemicals that produce the flavours and aromas, could help consumers to identify new beers to try, by comparing the lab’s profiles to ones they like.

But Verstrepen has loftier ambitions than helping beer lovers to select their next bottle. He wants to build the perfect yeast. His lab is deploying what it is learning about the chemical and genetic basis of beer flavour to breed yeast strains that generate unique flavours and other qualities coveted by brewers and drinkers.

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Op zondag 31 juli 2016 21:26 schreef Broomer het volgende:
Ik wist dat ze in San Diego bezig waren met yeast genomics en bier, maar dat blijkt dus een samenwrking met deze Belgische groep te zijn:

http://www.nytimes.com/20(...)etic-level.html?_r=0

Interessant!

Overigens denk ik niet dat je de perfecte gist krijgt, maar juist een heleboel gist varieteiten waarvan je precies weet wat voor smaakprofiel die op gaan leveren, en welke genen daarvoor verantwoordelijk zijn. En dan kan je lekker gaan recombineren en een superieure gist voor jouw smaak gaan bouwen.