New type of bubbles for beer

World’s largest brewer develops greener way to put bubbles in beer https://t.co/ckHtJJqYR2

— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) April 11, 2018

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.

At last a real breakfast of champions - Wheaties brand beer

HefeWheaties, the result of a collaboration between two Minneapolis companies: cereal-maker General Mills and brewer Fulton Beer, is giving new meaning to that beer before lunch.

National Public Radio brings the news of the new partnership.

As the name implies, the beer is a hefeweizen, the German style that relies on wheat for its base.
HefeWheaties, we were only somewhat disappointed to learn, does not include actual Wheaties. The beer is unfiltered and comes in a 16-ounce "tall boy" can, Fulton says. It will hit the market on Aug. 26 — but only at Twin Cities locations.
"We'll see how people react to it," says Fulton's Ryan Petz, the brewery's president and co-founder. "If it's something everybody loves, we'll obviously consider doing it again in a bigger and more widely distributed way in the future."
According to the General Mills blog, "The idea for HefeWheaties came up earlier this summer, thanks to some connections between Fulton's team" and some of the cereal-makers' employees.
"It's the first alcohol partnership for Wheaties, General Mills' original cereal, which was born in the 1920s," reports the Star Tribune.

A canned beer anniversary

It was 80 years ago today that beer in a can first went on sale - January 24, 1935 and Krueger's Finest Beer and Krueger's Cream Ale went the shelves in Richmond, VA USA

The first Krueger can as shown in The Brewer's News. This can surfaced briefly in 1985, but its whereabouts remain unknown.

The Brewery Collectibles Club of America records that the beer can really made its debut some 14 months earlier - just before the repeal of Prohibition. American Can Company had engineered a workable beer can.

All that was needed was a brewer willing to take the pioneering plunge. The Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, NJ signed on the dotted line in November 1933.By the end of that month, American had installed a temporary canning line and delivered 2,000 Krueger's Special Beer cans, which were promptly filled with 3.2% Krueger beer - the highest alcohol content allowed at the time. Krueger's Special Beer thus became the world's first beer can.The 2,000 cans of beer were given to faithful Krueger drinkers; 91% gave it thumbs up, and 85% said it tasted more like draft than bottled beer. Reassured by this successful test, Krueger gave canning the green light, and history was made.A photo of two Krueger Special cans appeared in the December 28, 1933 issue of Brewer's News, but no current example has been positively verified to exist.