Hoppy tasting beer without hops

Every pint of that craft beer you drink requires 50 pints of water just to grow the hops that give it flavour. Hence the search for an ecologically sustainable, and cheaper, alternative. And scientists from the University of California Berkeley believe theynhave found one. They have used used DNA-editing software to manipulate the genome of brewer’s yeast, splicing in genes from mint and basil plants as well as two from normal yeast in a way that boosted the production of flavors normally provided by adding hops during the brewing process. Details of their research were published this week in the journal Nature Communications under the title Industrial brewing yeast engineered for the production of primary flavor determinants in hopped beer.
Here's the Abstract of the article:

Flowers of the hop plant provide both bitterness and “hoppy” flavor to beer. Hops are, however, both a water and energy intensive crop and vary considerably in essential oil content, making it challenging to achieve a consistent hoppy taste in beer. Here, we report that brewer’s yeast can be engineered to biosynthesize aromatic monoterpene molecules that impart hoppy flavor to beer by incorporating recombinant DNA derived from yeast, mint, and basil. Whereas metabolic engineering of biosynthetic pathways is commonly enlisted to maximize product titers, tuning expression of pathway enzymes to affect target production levels of multiple commercially important metabolites without major collateral metabolic changes represents a unique challenge. By applying state-of-the-art engineering techniques and a framework to guide iterative improvement, strains are generated with target performance characteristics. Beers produced using these strains are perceived as hoppier than traditionally hopped beers by a sensory panel in a double-blind tasting.