REAL LIFE NEWS: MAKING BEER WITHOUT HOPS
by Hazed
Scientists have come up with a way to brew beer without using hops. This is a good thing because growing hops is incredibly water-intensive, with over 100 billion litres of water used in the US alone to irrigate the hop crop.
Hops can also vary subtly from year to year which affects the flavour of the beer – sometimes unpleasantly – so there are many reasons why developing a way to do without them would be a good thing.
Hops are key to imparting flavour and aroma to beer so the researchers from University of California, Berkeley needed to find a way to get that hoppy taste from something else. They took brewer’s yeast, which is used to ferment the beer, and tinkered with its DNA, adding four new genes to give that hop flavour.
The resulting beer was tasted in a blind test against a control beer made the traditional way. The drinkers said that the hop-free beer actually tasted more hoppy than the control. They described the taste as having notes of “orange blossom” and “fruit loop”.
The authors of the paper describing the experiments with hop-free beer have now launched Berkeley Brewing Science and intend to market the hoppy yeasts to brewers.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/22/hop_hop_hooray_hopfree_beer_is_here/
