When it comes to craft beer, the flavor doesn’t have to be all in the hops. As a panel of amateur beer tasters at Washington State University recently demonstrated, malted barley, the number one ingredient in beer besides water, can have a range of desirable flavors too.
Researchers recruited a panel of about 100 craft beer drinkers to taste some so-called SMaSH beers — those brewed with a single barley malt and single hop. All the beers contained the same hop variety, called Tahoma, but each had a malt from a different barley genotype, or genetic makeup. Trained tasters can distinguish these easily, but even the untrained panel could taste the difference among five different barley varieties — and definitely favored some more than others.
«We found that the untrained panelists could differentiate among the barley breeding lines in the beer,» said Evan Craine, a WSU doctoral student and first author on the study in the Journal of Food Science. «They did a good job of selecting attributes that revealed distinctive profiles for each of the beers.»
The panel generally preferred the four barley breeding lines developed at WSU over the control, known as Copeland, a high-quality malting barley widely grown in Washington state. The panelists were able to easily identify the flavor profiles of the beers, such as one with a «fruity and sweet aromatic» flavor and another with a «citrus» profile made with a barley called Palmer, a variety recently released by WSU for commercial use.
While the untrained panel could distinguish flavors from brewed beers, they were not as adept at tasting the differences among «hot steep» samples which are made by combining hot water and ground barley malt before filtering. This creates a sweet liquid — similar to that made by brewers before yeast is added to create alcohol.
The researchers had hoped amateur beer tasters could distinguish flavor differences in the hot steep as it would shorten the testing process for new barley varieties. Corresponding author Kevin Murphy was not ready to give up on the method.
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Materials provided by Washington State University. Original written by Sara Zaske. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.