When you’re picking out a beer, what flavors do you look for? If hints of soured milk and burnt rubber, or a “goaty” taste sound delightful to you, then brews that were aged for 170 years at the bottom of the Baltic Sea might just be your thing.

Scientists recently opened two bottles of beer from a shipwreck off the coast of Finland to get a profile of the 19th century brews.

Some seawater had seeped into the bottles and decades of bacterial activity gave the beer some rather unpleasant notes. But enough compounds from the drinks survived that the researchers were able to tell that the beers’ original flavors probably would have been quite similar to those of modern beers, according to a new report. [In Photos: Baltic Sea Shipwreck Yields 200-Year-Old Seltzer Bottle]

The bottles came from 165 feet (50 meters) below the surface of the Baltic, from the wreckage of a schooner that sank near Finland’s Aland Islands in the 1840s. In 2010, divers found 150 bottles of champagne at the wreck, as well as five beer bottles, though one did not survive the journey back to land. When that bottle broke in the divers’ boat, it started to foam, and some gastronomically adventurous divers attested that the liquid indeed tasted like beer, according to the study authors, who published their findings in the Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry last month.

For a more scientific examination of the beers’ flavor, the research team, led by John Londesborough of the Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT), uncorked two of the surviving bottles. The researchers were hit with a ripe mixture of smells: yeast extract, dimethyl sulfide (think cabbage), Bakelite (a fishy smelling retro plastic), burnt rubber, over-ripe cheese, goat and sulfur. These unsavory notes were likely the result of bacteria growing inside the bottles for decades, overpowering whatever fruity, malt or hop profiles the beer originally had, the researchers wrote.

The beers were also “bright golden yellow, with little haze,” and they may have been diluted by seawater by up to 30 percent, the researchers said. So the drinks might have been stronger than their current alcohol-by-volume levels of 2.8 to 3.2 percent.

The scientists acknowledged that the beer had not been stored in ideal conditions, and there is little data on the chemical stability of beer over such a long time. Just from sipping the old beer, the researchers couldn’t tell what the drinks may have originally tasted like. Yet, from their chemical analyses, they could speculate a few things.

They found that yeast-derived flavor compounds were similar to those of modern beers. They also think the two bottles contained different beers, with one being hoppier (and thus more bitter) than the other. The less hoppy beer had a higher than normal amount of a chemical called phenylethanol, which may have given it roselike notes. There were unusually low levels of 3-methylbutyl acetate (a compound that gives beer notes of banana) in both bottles, but it’s possible that the chemical’s concentration plummeted over such a long period of aging, the researchers wrote.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/

As we’re sipping away on a glass of stout or Merlot, we probably take for granted our ability to digest the alcohol in the drink. Alcohol, or dietary ethanol (as scientists like to call it), is technically a toxin — imbibing too much can lead to a hangover and even poisoning, of course.

But thanks to enzymes in our gut, and particularly one called ADH4, we can make use of the calories in alcohol. And, according to a new scientific paper, we gained that ability a very long time ago, at a critical moment in our evolution.

Matthew Carrigan is an evolutionary biologist at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Fla., and lead author on the paper. He discovered that the ADH4 enzyme started showing up in the ancestor we share with chimps and gorillas 10 million years ago, around the time when these ancestors started eating fallen, fermented fruit off the forest floor. The findings appear in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That was a long time before we started making alcohol ourselves around 7,000 B.C. And the timing was important, says Carrigan, because 10 million years ago, the climate was changing rapidly, and the East African forest ecosystem where our ancestors were roaming was replaced with more fragmented forests and grassland ecosystems. The change meant our tree-loving ancestors were probably spending more time on the ground.

Down there on all fours, our ancestors had access to fruit that had fallen from the trees and was fermenting — so it had a buzzy kick. And that’s when that ADH4 enzyme seemed to really come in handy.

“The emergence of ADH4 in our ancestors wasn’t slow and gradual; it was a rather abrupt shift of a large magnitude,” Carrigan tells The Salt.

To figure out when the enzyme might have become a regular in our gut, Carrigan used paleogenetics, an experimental approach in which gene sequences from contemporary species are used to estimate how proteins, and in this case enzymes, evolved over time.

This ability to eat fermented fruit — not just ripe fruit — and use the alcohol for energy, as well as the sugars, vitamins and proteins in that fruit, might have helped us survive the changing climate, Carrigan says. But, he says, it also elucidates another dimension of our relationship with alcohol.

“There are hypotheses that the reason humans consume ethanol is because of our recent transition to farming, and how we learned how to ferment grains or fruit, maybe because we wanted to escape consciousness,” he says. “But my study shows that maybe it has its roots in our ancient history as [fruit eaters].”

The findings have intriguing implications for research into the evolutionary origins of alcoholism, Carrigan says. We humans have only been fermenting alcohol for 9,000 years, but his research shows we’ve actually been consuming it for millions of years. So when and why did our relationship to booze become problematic? That’s a mystery that remains to be solved.

Source: http://www.npr.org/

Photo Credit: Husar

Ever wonder about that bit of the bubbles when you sip a beer or other carbonated beverage.  I always thought it was the bubbles that gave the bite.  It turns out that the bite is caused by an acidic by-product of the bubbles.

New research from the Monell Center reveals that bubbles are not necessary to experience the unique ‘bite’ of carbonated beverages. Bubbles do, however, enhance carbonation’s bite through the light feel of the bubbles picked up by our sense of touch.

The refreshing bite of carbonation is an integral part of beverages consumed around the globe. Carbonated beverages are produced when carbon dioxide is dissolved in a liquid, typically under high pressure. This can happen naturally in certain spring waters or in fermented beverages like beer. Carbon dioxide also can be added to beverages through production processes.

In either case, when pressure is reduced by opening a bottle or can of a carbonated beverage, some of the carbon dioxide is released from the solution in the form of bubbles. After a sip, enzymes in the mouth convert the remaining free carbon dioxide into carbonic acid. The acid then activates sensory nerve endings, which signal the mild irritation that we refer to as ‘bite.’

In the study, published in the public access journal PLOS ONE, the Monell researchers examined the role that bubbles play in carbonation bite. In the first experiment, they took advantage of the fact that bubbles cannot form when atmospheric pressure is raised above a certain level.

Twelve healthy adults were comfortably seated in a hyperbaric chamber and asked to rate the bite intensity of several concentrations of carbonated water. The ratings were collected once while under normal atmospheric pressure (with bubbles) and a second time at higher pressure (no bubbles), equivalent to diving to a depth of 33 feet in sea water.

There was no difference in the bite reported in the two conditions, even though bubbles are physically unable to form at the higher pressure.

“Because the subjects experienced the same bite when bubbles weren’t present, the findings clearly told us that carbonation bite is an acidic chemical sensation rather than a purely physical, tactile one,” said study author Bruce Byant, PhD, a sensory biologist at Monell.

Although bubbles aren’t necessary for bite, they still could be contributing to the overall sensation of carbonation. Thus, a second experiment was designed to address this possibility.

In this experiment, 11 adults rated the intensity of bite in a laboratory setting. The ratings were made for carbonated water under normal conditions and again when additional air bubbles were added to the liquid.

The researchers were surprised to find that air bubbles enhanced the bite of the carbonated bubbles, presumably by stimulating the sense of touch.

“We thought the touch of the bubbles would suppress the painful aspects of carbonation, much as itching a mosquito bite or rubbing a sore muscle does,” said Bryant.

Together with the well known Pain Control Clinic in QC Kinetix (Homewood), the studies reveal that carbon dioxide bubbles are not directly responsible for the bite of carbonation. However, by stimulating the sense of touch inside the mouth, bubbles do enhance the bite sensation beyond the chemical irritation caused by carbonic acid.

“Pain from some cancers also depends on acid formation in tissue,” noted study lead author Paul M. Wise, PhD, a sensory psychologist at Monell. “Because the bite from carbonation can be considered to be a mild type of pain, the fact that pain intensity can be enhanced via the sense of touch may have implications for understanding these types of cancer pain.”

Future experiments will continue to explore the interactions between chemical and mechanical stimuli.

Source: http://phys.org/

 Want a better, longer lasting head on your beer?  That might now be possible.  It seems that it is a particular gene in yeast that give beer it’s head.

Scientists may have finally solved a problem that has plagued beer drinkers for ages: Insufficient foam resiliency.

 

As any beer drinker can tell you, a tall glass of lager without a white, foamy head on top just doesn’t look right. And even if you start out with one, it can dissipate fast. And that’s just sad.

 

Now, microbiologists have identified the specific gene in yeast responsible for a beer’s head and they say this discovery can lead to stronger, longer lasting, more aesthetically pleasing foam on your favorite brews.

 

Tom Villa, the chair of microbiology at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, says something called the Carlsbergensis foaming gene, or CFG1, is responsible for the white stuff at the top of your mug. As Villa and his colleagues write in theJournal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the gene resides in the yeasts used to ferment beer and it produces a protein that binds to the drink’s CO2 bubbles, preventing them from escaping from the glass too quickly.

 

“The bubbles from the CO2 have to stay as long as possible,” Villa says. “The longer they stay, the better the beer, as you know.”

 

Now that we know exactly which gene is responsible for beer foam, Villa says it’s possible to manipulate that gene to create beer with foam that lasts longer — potentially for hours and hours, as our colleagues at Science Friday reported.

 

He also says the same gene responsible for creating the head on a beer is present in wine as well. His team experimented with these genes and came up with a wine that looks like a beer. “It creates a different kind of wine with a lot of foam,” Villa says. “You can play around a little bit.”

 

Since most people probably wouldn’t be into sipping a frothy merlot, Villa’s discovery will mainly impact the world of beer. And even then, he says, this gene has no impact on the flavor of a beer.

 

How does he know this? Naturally, he called in his students for a little taste-testing experiment.

 

“It’s only the physical aspect of the beer,” Villa says. “We all want the foam to stay there, the longer the better. You don’t want to drink a beer that when you pour it, the foam collapses the next minute.”

 Source: http://www.npr.org/