As the beer industry expands and new styles emerge, brewers are searching for ways to analyze their products and preserve their carefully crafted flavors. This article explores how a team of researchers at the University of Victoria has developed a microfluidic device to investigate the role of emulsions in enhancing hop flavors in beer. The innovative technology could become an invaluable tool for brewers worldwide, helping them unlock the chemical secrets behind the perfect pint.
Unveiling the Chemistry of Craft Beer
The brewing process has been one of life’s great “dark arts”, the way malted barley, hops, water, and yeast interact in dizzyingly complex ways is still not entirely appreciated. New beer styles, such as hazy pale ales, are born and the brewer begins to investigate how best to analyze their beers for composition and to preserve the sensory characteristics in their finished product.
This is because there are so many different molecules in beer that it is much more difficult to learn about the behavior and interactions of individual compounds and how they contribute to the taste/overall composition of the beverage. When seeking to overcome the issues with hop flavor, a team of researchers at the University of Victoria have designed a research platform called Lab-in-a-chip, which can be readily used in beer-making for studying how more hop-flavored type beers might be produced through oil-in-beer emulsions.
Microfluidics: The Brewing Industry’s Secret Weapon
Lab-on-a-chip, or microfluidic, systems are small devices that use the same types of channels found in microfabricated pipes and valves to transport and analyze fluids. Even though the application of these technologies is not particularly prevalent in food science, emulsions that find applications throughout the food industry may be easily made and studied.
The best-known example of an emulsion is an oil-in-vinegar mix such as occurs in salad dressings; this kind of emulsification involves tiny drops of one liquid dispersed in another immiscible liquid. One of the authors stated that hop oils (essential oils from hops) are stabilized in beer, which is like water but knowing the molecule responsible for this stabilization should improve the process of making more hop-flavored beers. For example, the microfluidic platform developed by the research team can replicate full-scale brewing at a size where experiments can be performed quickly and easily, leading to new important findings about how beer is made.
Unlocking the Secrets of Hazy Beers
The teams of the University of Victoria, in partnership with Phillips Brewing and Malting Co., examined how gluten (a beer protein) contributes towards the stabilization of hop oil emulsions. Using this knowledge then, a better profile of ingredients can be selected by the brewers to have more control over how their beers will appear and taste.
One of the hop oils we tested was alpha-terpene and another was linalool, two common constituents in hoppy beers. Casein and enzyme treatment did not affect the droplet stability when hop oil A was used but had a greater destabilizing effect when hop oil B was used suggesting that stabilization could be dependent also on the type of hop oil. This information could provide brewers with accurate knowledge to choose grains and hops that can offer the longest shelf life, great taste in this style of beer, also logistical bottlenecks between barley suppliers around the world.
