SYNBIO RESCUES BEER!!! (Well, the non-alcoholic type) Often non-alcoholic beer doesn’t tastes like conventionally brewed beer. This is mainly due to the loss of volatile hop flavours from dealcoholisation or lack of a full fermentation to extract hop flavours. Now synbio has come to the rescue by genetic engineering yeast to produce “small molecules called monoterpenoids”. These are the ingredients which provide the hop flavour in conventional beer. By adding them after the brewing process they add back the flavour lost in dealcoholisation or short fermentation.
This also improves beer’s sustainability because apparently “..aroma hops are mainly farmed in the west coast of the U.S., which causes the need for extensive transportation and cooling down the crops in refrigerators. Secondly, hops demand lots of water – more accurately you need 2,7 tons of water to grow one kilogram of hops. This combined makes it a not very climate-friendly production.”
Synthetic biology will fundamentally change our world. From beer to food ingredients to cheese making we’ve barely scratched the surface of what synbio is capable of achieving.
I can’t wait to see the advances on the market in 2030!
