03 Jul Professor Matthew Bochman’s Newest Challenge: Mapping the Sour Beer MicroBiome
Update: With only a couple days left, Professor Bochman’s Experiment.com campaign has reached its goal and surpassed it by over $200.
Sour beer has taken over the craft beer world. Not only is every brewery around town creating their own versions, but breweries specializing in sour beers have begun to pop up. While it may seem like brewing up a sour beer is as easy as, say, a pale ale, it’s far from it. Moreover, there is a lot, scientifically, that is still unknown about the sour beer brewing process. IU Professor Matthew Bochman plans to change that.
If you follow Indiana beer news, then you’ve likely heard of Professor Bochman before. Back in March, he helped Upland Brewing Co. figure out a solution to “terminal acid shock”, which can occur during the fermentation process of sour beers.
Professor Bochman is back, this time with the goal of mapping the sour beer microbiome. If that just went over your head like it did mine, no worries! I had him explain what mapping a microbiome is in layman’s terms.
“A microbiome is the community of microbes (single-celled organisms like bacteria and yeast) that lives in a particular environment. So, there’s a microbiome in your intestines helping you to digest food, a microbiome in the soil keeping plants healthy, and a microbiome living on the grain that beer is made of. When we say that we want to “map” the microbiome, we really just want to identify all of the microbes so that we can figure out which species we’re dealing with and how abundant they are relative to one another. For instance, we’re trying to answer questions like, is malted barley colonized by more bacteria or yeast, and which bacteria can we find?”
Back in March, Jeff Young from Blue Owl Brewing—a brewery out of Austin, Texas that specializes in sour beers—reached out, Professor Bochman told me.
“[He] emailed me shortly after my lab’s paper with Upland was published in Food Microbiology to see if I was interested in working on this project with him,” said Professor Bochman.
According to their Experiment.com page, “The object of this experiment is to determine the microflora on various malted grains and to sample souring beer at various time points to determine which microbes thrive, grow, and ferment during wort-souring.”
“Blue Owl Brewing will collect the samples over the course of 24 hours. The Bochman lab at Indiana University will then isolate microbial DNA and prepare next-generation sequencing libraries. The DNAs will be sequenced and the samples compared to one another to: 1) determine the species present and their relative abundances at each time point; and 2) how that microbial community changes with time. The organic acids in the final beer (lactic acid, acetic acid, etc.) will also be identified, as these are the compounds that the tongue recognizes as ‘sour’.”
Research, though, costs a lot of time and money. And money isn’t easy to come by without grants or donations in the science community. So, they decided to use Experiment.com, a crowdfunding platform specifically for scientific research, to obtain the money needed to complete the experiments.
The group is looking for $5,892 to fund their experiment. As of writing, they’ve received $4,543 (78 percent funded) with 16 days left. The funding will be used for:
“Determining the sour beer microbiome requires next-generation sequencing. The Sequencing library prep kits and the preparation itself are vital to a successful, data-rich sequencing run on the MiSeq v3, and custom bioinformatics analysis is required to make sense of the huge amounts of data that next-gen sequencing provides. We are also interested in the organic acids produced by the microbes during souring and fermentation (as they account for much of the flavor in the finished beer), and high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) is the gold standard to analyze these secondary metabolites.”
Young and Professor Bochman talked about other experiments, but both agreed that mapping the sour beer microbiome would benefit everyone in the beer community.
“…the overarching hypothesis is that if we can learn enough about the players (i.e., microbes) involved in the souring process, so Blue Owl and other sour breweries can make better sour beer,” said Professor Bochman. “They can use our data to make smart decisions when it comes to choosing bacteria for kettle souring, making a more consistent product, surveying new lots of grain for their souring process, and formulating new beer recipes.”
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