14 DAY TRIAL // It's good news for people who love and adore beer but who are forced to keep away from it whenever they go out for a night on the town and their friends crown them their designated driver.
Long story short, brainiacs with the University of Valladolid in Spain are now hard at work making alcohol-free beer taste less like oddly colored bubbly water and more like the real deal.
In fact, they claim to have already come up with a technique to infuse the aromas that give regular beer its exquisite taste into alcohol-free beverages and to have even had a panel of testers confirm the effectiveness of this technique.
Turning alcohol-free beer into regular one
In a paper published in the Journal of Food Engineering earlier this week, the University of Valladolid scientists behind this research project explain that regular beer owes its distinctive taste to alcohol's ability to act as a solvent for various aromatic compounds.
Since it does not contain any alcohol, the beer that designated drivers are forced to drink does not pack all that many aromatic compounds. Consequently, it more often than not comes out of a bottle or a barrel pretty much tasteless.
Looking to solve this problem, the Spanish scientists perfected a technique to extract aromatic compounds from regular beer and have them infused in non-alcoholic varieties. They claim that, once subjected to this treatment, alcohol-free beer tastes way better.
“This technique consists in using a semipermeable membrane to separate two fractions from alcoholic beer: one liquid phase in which alcohol is retained, and another gaseous phase, where the aromatic compounds come in.”
“Then, this gaseous phase can be condensed, the aromatic compounds extracted and added to non-alcoholic beer,” study author Carlos A. Blanco explained how the technique developed by him and his colleagues works in a recent interview.
Putting the technique to the test
In a recent series of experiments, the researchers started by extracting aromatic compounds, i.e. ethyl acetate, isoamyl acetate and isobutyl alcohol, from two different beers whose alcohol content was one of 5.5% and 6.5%, respectively.
They then added the extracted compounds to a low-alcohol beer and an alcohol-free beer, and invited a panel of experts over for a drink. Of the experts that gave these beverages a try, 90% said that the enriched low-alcohol beer tasted better than the original did. 80% said the same about the enriched alcohol-free beer.
It's important to note that, for the time being at least, there is no way scientists can capture all the aromas present in regular beer and have them infused in non-alcoholic varieties. Simply put, low-alcohol and alcohol-free beer will never taste exactly the same as regular one does.
Then again, it comes as good news that scientists are trying to come up with ways to make low-alcohol and non-alcoholic beer more appealing to the general public. More so given the fact that, as shown by several studies, alcohol not only makes one a really lousy driver but can also cause all sorts of health trouble.