| Title | Making Hop Flavor Without Using Hops | |
| Date | Thursday March 22 2018, @09:39AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the I'll-drink-to-that dept. | ||
The hop plant Humulus lupulus L. produces a flower with remarkable biochemical properties. When boiled, various compounds are isomerized and produce bitter-tasting compounds that serve to cut what would be a very sweet drink to make it palatable, but it also has good antimicrobal characteristics that keeps the beer from spoiling. Depending upon the beer style, they can also make a significant flavor contribution, such as the pine notes from Northern Brewer and Chinook, the citrus and tropical notes from Citra, or even the chocolate notes from Southern Cross. A thousand different chemical compounds have been identified in hops, but two major ones that drive hop flavor are linalool and geraniol. It is the subtle relative differences between hops varieties of these and other compounds that lets one produce beers with a very broad range of flavor profiles.
A team of researchers wanted to insert the genetic material that produces linalool and geraniol into the brewing yeast and have those compounds generated during the fermentation process. They inserted the gene sequences that are known to produce these compounds into a widely used commercial strain of beer yeast (White Labs WLP001). They made beer using these engineered strains as well as one with an unmodified strain and presented the results to a tasting panel. The found that the engineered strains produced a product that had a "hoppier" flavor than the unmodified strain.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03293-x
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