Soon, engineered beers to suit the flavour of your choice
By ANIThursday, September 30, 2010
WASHINGTON - Brewers may soon be able to engineer the flavour and aroma of beer, for scientists have done the most comprehensive deciphering of the beer’s “proteome”-the set of proteins that make beer “beer”.
Pier Giorgio Righetti and colleagues say they were inspired to do the research by a popular Belgian story, Les Ma�tres de l’Orge (The Brew Masters), which chronicles the fortunes of a family of brewers over 150 years.
They realized that beer ranks behind only water and tea as the world’s most popular beverage, and yet little research had been done to identify the full set of proteins that make up beer.
Those proteins, they note, play a key role in the formation, texture, and stability of the foamy “head” that drinkers value so highly.
Nevertheless, scientists had identified only a dozen beer proteins, including seven from the barley used to make beer and two from yeast.
They identified 20 barley proteins, 40 proteins from yeast, and two proteins from corn, representing the largest-ever portrait of the beer proteome.
“These findings might help brewers in devising fermentation processes in which the release of yeast proteins could be minimized, if such components could alter the flavor of beer, or maximized in case of species improving beer’s aroma,” noted the report.
The report on the proteome appears in ACS’ monthly Journal of Proteome Research. (ANI)
