• Scientists Engineer Yeast to Make Beer Without Hops
    33 replies, posted
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/craft-beer-hops.html A friend of mine mentioned that this project was in the works about a year ago. Glad to see it's coming along. Nature Communications article for those interested here.
No more bitch tits
So is this like sort of like a beer version of Kombucha?
Kombucha is made by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). Old fashioned ginger beer falls into that category too. Here they've done something completely different. They've tracked down the genes responsible for making the flavor compounds in hops (terpenes and terpenoids) and transplanted those genes from a variety of plants into yeast. Now their strain of yeast can make these flavor compounds on its own so you don't have to add hop flowers (or at least as many as before) to get the hop flavor. I wouldn't be surprised if people tried to repurpose their techniques for other terpenes/terpenoids. These compounds make up tons of flavorings and scents, and there's a whole host of drug candidates out there that are quite difficult to synthesize. If you can make a yeast or bacteria that can make those compounds for you instead, you can bypass a ton of problems when you're trying to make stuff at an industrial scale.
micro-brewer / involved in the industry for over 6 years here; this is super super interesting, wondering if the alpha acids that are used for bittering as well as the different stages of hop introduction to the beer ( during heat, dry hopping, etc ) can also be simulated. this is also especially important because hops are all contracted. you technically own huge lots of them and can buy and sell off your own contract / other contracts. right now huge, huge scale breweries are basically shutting out access to certain hops buy overbuying contracts and holding them. frustrating. we had an issue getting some hops for a core beer of ours last year because someone happened to literally buy all of them available for the 2017 crop year.
Isn’t it the yeast that’s loaded with carbs, not the hops?
The guy I know mentioned that alpha acid synthesis was also in the works. I vaguely remember someone talking about a couple genes pulled from broccoli facilitating this, but this was over a year ago and things change pretty quickly in the research world. I don't do yeast work myself, so I have no idea how viable that method might be :V From the Nature article, it looks like they're primarily using derivatives of WLP001. They brewed an APA using WLP001 and their yeasts, and then also compared their strains to batches that were dry hopped. In both cases tasters perceived their strains to be hoppier, and they found that these batches had higher linalool content.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe hops has analogues of estrogen in it. That might be what they're talking about. I don't know if it's ever been proven that it's enough to cause breast growth in males, though.
Hops do have phytoestrogens, but the doses required for something like gynecomastia to occur are probably extreme. You'd be more likely to grow tits because of the calories at that point.
They say the same about soy and how it isnt strong enough to have an effect, but new studies are proving otherwise. That and look at all the faggots who srink soy
Honestly I'm surprised this hasn't been done more often. I imagine the amount of effort needed to engineer the strain such that it produces just the right mix of aroma compounds probably outweighs the benefits in most cases, although I suspect it might be worth it for things like oils and incense obtained from endangered species (agarwood is the first that comes to mind).
Where'd the "Report post" button go This is not me announcing a report, I just literally cannot find it at all anywhere
I dont know, this forums layout has been a puzzle to me since the change
phytoestrogens as a note are not the same as estrogen the human body has at all
Soy Boy detected
well, to a point. bio reactors take quite a lot of space for relatively low yield. its fine for pharma where they charge 10,000$/gram but industrial scale its probably not good enough.
What a twist: you've been cracking open a cold one with the soy boys all along.
I would love to see how this tastes, I bet you can tell the difference because Guiness without hops? Yeah I think it would taste very odd.
But I love hops.
Ham man, perhaps?
explain?
Really? Which ones? Because the overwhelming majority of phytoestrogens are flavonoids or coumestans, and I really don't see how those could even remotely be metabolised into a steroid.
If you're going to ask someone to admit that they "don't really know the subject", you should probably make sure that you're not equally ignorant, if not more so.
Onions
It's one thing to detect a compound in someone's urine It's another for that compound to get to a therapeutic dose. Unless you're drinking a lot of beer every day with a lot of hops, you're probably not going to hit that threshold.
Beer without hops isn't anything new though. If anything, it's older than beer without hops. Before the middle ages, beer was almost always made without it. Hopped beer was perfected in Bohemia, but still took over two centuries to spread over Europe. At some point the Brewers Company of London stated "no hops, herbs, or other like thing be put into any ale or liquore wherof ale shall be made – but only liquor (water), malt, and yeast."
Beer without hops isn't anything new, but yeast that can produce the flavor of hops by itself is new. People still brew with yarrow, myrtle, rosemary, juniper, and other hop alternatives.
You could also just, I dunno, exercise
Im jacked as fuck brah, seriously
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