The history of brewing beer goes to 7000 BCE. It goes close to invention of agriculture. Babylonian king Hammurabi’s law from 108 through 11 regulated beer through constitution and people have been anxious to safeguard the quality of beer. The food regulation allows only barley, water and hops as ingredients for brewing beer. As per a study in Frontiers in chemistry which used state of the art analytical methods tens of thousands of different molecules have been found in commercial beers around the globe.
The Chemical Complexity
“Beer is example of chemical complexity. With the improved analytical chemistry it is easy to trace tiny variations in chemistry through food processing process.” Said corresponding author Prof Philippe Schmitt Kopplin, head of the Comprehensive Foodomics Platform at the Technical University of Munich. They used two powerful methods direct infusion and ultra-performance liquid chromatography to reveal full range of metabolites in 467 types of beers. These beers were brewed in different part of the world ranging from US, Europe, Africa and East Asia. These were lagers, craft and abbey beers. MS used chromatography to first separate ions with identical masses and fragmentation making it possible to predict molecular structure. The author placed these metabolites with ‘chemical space’ and linked one to another through single reaction for example addition of hydroxyl, sulfate or sugar group. This yielded a reconstruction of a metabolite linking to final product.
Powerful and unique method for quality control
Mass spectrometry method which takes 10 minutes can be powerful for quality control can set basis of novel molecular and can do inspection of quality of beer. The authors found 7700 ions with masses of lipids, peptides, nucleotides, phosphates 80% of which are not described in chemical databases. This translates into tens of thousands of unique metabolites.
“Enormous chemical diversity has been revealed with tens of unique molecules and complex reaction leads to development of novel bioactive molecules of interest for health,” concluded first author Stefan Pieczonka, a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich.
