Finally, researchers have found a way to brew non-alcoholic beer that tastes just like regular beer. Even more, the method is far more sustainable than the existing brewing techniques.
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.
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, he says.
But now, Kampranis and his colleague Simon Dusseaux — both founders of the biotech company — 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 its a game changer for non-alcoholic beer, says Sotirios Kampranis.
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 bakers yeast cells into that can be grown in fermenters and release the aroma of hops, they state in .
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Materials provided by University of Copenhagen — Faculty of Science. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.