Environmentally Friendly Hopless Beer – Yeah, It’s A Thing

California Scientists have developed a more environmentally friendly process that enables them to craft beer without using hops, saving the vast amounts of water it takes to grow them and possibly introducing world-changing brewing practices.

Here’s the deal…

The Drinks Business is reporting that researchers at UC Berkeley have engineered a strain of yeast that not only ferments the beer, but also imparts flavors traditionally associated hops eliminating what some see as the enormous impact that growing hops has on the environment.

Charles Denby, one of the paper’s author’s which was recently published in the Nature Communications and is incredibly dense (there’s a reason this crew ended up at Berkeley), has more than just gene-splicing skills he’s also a fermentation obsessed homebrewer.

And Denby took those interests and his concerns about the hop’s impact on the environment to the lab…

“Not only do hops require a lot of water, management, agricultural land, but the environmental impact involved in their transportation is huge, and are expensive….I found out that the molecules that give hops their hoppy flavor are terpene molecules, and it wouldn’t be too big of a stretch to think we could develop strains that make terpenes at the same concentrations that you get when you make beer and add hops to them.”

And the process that went into this engineered yeast strain is right out of Altered Carbon…

This from the Drinks Business….

“The engineered yeast strains were altered using a gene-editing tool invented at UC Berkeley, and were produced by inserting four new genes into industrial brewer’s yeast. This includes linalool synthase and geraniol synthase, which in this case were taken from mint and basil, and code for enzymes that produce flavor components. The two other genes were from yeast and boosted the production of precursor molecules needed to make linalool and geraniol, the hoppy flavor components.”

You got that? We thought so…

But the researcher’s paper does speak to bold new brewing possibilities (even if we couldn’t understand most of it).

And the fact that in a double blind test Lagunitas employees reported that “beer made from the engineered strains were more hoppy than a control beer made with regular yeast and Cascade hops is undeniably interesting…that’s for sure.

“My hope is that if we can use the technology to make great beer that is produced with a more sustainable process, people will embrace that,” said Denby.

And given that he and his fellow- researchers live in water-starved California, we can’t help but agree.