Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I. Today I will
Speaker 1: be reading National Geographic magazine debted February twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article
Speaker 1: titled The Quest to re Engineer Beer by Adam Rogers.
Speaker 1: Scientists in Belgium that celebrated bastion of ancient beer culture
Speaker 1: are harnessing genetic breakthroughs and machine learning to reimagine how
Speaker 1: great booze gets built. Here's how their revelations in the
Speaker 1: lab could transform the global beer industry. The secretive beer
Speaker 1: lab inside the headquarters of the world's biggest brewing company
Speaker 1: doesn't often allow visitors, but today ab InBev has something
Speaker 1: it would like to show off, so David de Schutter,
Speaker 1: the head of ab Imbev's Global Innovationation and Technology Center,
Speaker 1: the official name of the beer Lab, is showing me around.
Speaker 1: The squat black building on the outskirts of Luvan, Belgium,
Speaker 1: about a half hour east of Brussels, Belgium, is one
Speaker 1: of beer's ancestral Homelands. Across the street from the lab
Speaker 1: is the brewery that makes Stella Artois. Luvan Is crossed
Speaker 1: by canals originally built by brewers to move their product.
Speaker 1: This is a beer company in a beer town in
Speaker 1: a beer country. So the office building has a dedicated
Speaker 1: tasting room with a heggerator. When we get there to
Speaker 1: Shooter's colleagues have arrayed some snacks along with twelve different
Speaker 1: kinds of beer for me to try. That's enough beer
Speaker 1: to give Homer Simpson pause. Taste testing alcohol typically demands
Speaker 1: small SIPs, copious notes, and a lot of hepatic fortitude,
Speaker 1: but not today, because most of those beers are alcohol free.
Speaker 1: This might come as a surprise after all. In addition
Speaker 1: to Stella, a b Imbev owns Budweiser, Corona Modello, Globe,
Speaker 1: and several other well known brands. It is to beer
Speaker 1: what Google is to the Internet, or Exon Mobil is
Speaker 1: to oil, and beer is generally understood to be alcoholic.
Speaker 1: Yet here I am taking a skeptical sip of michelob
Speaker 1: Ultra Zero and Corona Sero, a b Imbev's state of
Speaker 1: the art flagship non alcoholic beers. As a technical matter,
Speaker 1: it's not hard to get the alcohol out of beer,
Speaker 1: but it's hard to make the result taste good. You
Speaker 1: tend to get something that is, to paraphrase the author
Speaker 1: Douglas Adams, almost but not quite entirely unlike beer. Ab
Speaker 1: Imbev introduced micalob ultra zero in early twenty twenty five
Speaker 1: as the worldwide market for na beer's was quickly ramping up,
Speaker 1: and these were the best tasting examples its science could deliver.
Speaker 1: They were fine. The sugar is proud of these beers,
Speaker 1: but he must know they're merely fine. Then he offers
Speaker 1: me a bottle of the new state of the art.
Speaker 1: This is ab Imbev's latest biotechnological invention, non alcoholic negra medello,
Speaker 1: made with something dubbed smart yeast, a new strain of
Speaker 1: the essential microorganism that makes all beer possible. Medello is
Speaker 1: typically bottled at five point four percent alcohol. Smart East Medello,
Speaker 1: as I came to call it, clocks in at zero
Speaker 1: point four percent at the moment. Smart Yeast medello is
Speaker 1: available only in Mexico. It's basically still in beta. Medello
Speaker 1: is my usual order with Mexican food, so I'm familiar
Speaker 1: enough to detect deviation from speck. In beer terms, negro
Speaker 1: medello is a Munich type dunkle, mahogany colored and malty.
Speaker 1: I take a whiff. It has the same roasted, hoppy
Speaker 1: aroma of medello. Now a sip, it has a good
Speaker 1: balance of sweeter, malt and bitterness. The mouth feel seems
Speaker 1: a little thin, maybe slightly too astringent. It wasn't quite medello,
Speaker 1: but it was eminently drinkable. The shooter takes a sip too,
Speaker 1: then looks at me. We're super excited about this, he says.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty four, ab Imbev made sixty billion dollars
Speaker 1: and produced fifteen billion gallons of beer. But today, for
Speaker 1: the first time, after thousands of years of uninterrupted success,
Speaker 1: the nearly trillion dollar beer industry is in decline. In
Speaker 1: beer drinking epicenters like Belgium and Australia, consumption has gone
Speaker 1: down by fifty percent in the past half century. Beer
Speaker 1: consumption in the United States is down twenty five percent
Speaker 1: since nineteen eighty. In twenty twenty three, Americans bought less
Speaker 1: beer than in any other country than in any other
Speaker 1: year this century. Younger people in particular are drinking less,
Speaker 1: and no one's quite sure why it's happening in places
Speaker 1: where marijuana is legal and where it's illegal, so that's
Speaker 1: not the culprit. There's certainly more health conscious and more
Speaker 1: skeptical of even moderate amounts of alcohol. A recent report
Speaker 1: from Rebaubank hinted that gen zers spend less on booze
Speaker 1: because they have less money overall. But then why are
Speaker 1: canned cocktails surging? Do gen zers really prefer a tall
Speaker 1: can of salted caramel banana pina colada. What's abundantly clear
Speaker 1: is that beer is taking the hit category wide, from
Speaker 1: ultra bitter West Coast IPAs to English pub style ales.
Speaker 1: With just one glaring exception, non alcoholic beer. Sales of
Speaker 1: NA beer is defined as under zero point five percent
Speaker 1: alcohol by volume, were up twenty nine percent in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four in the US. The marketing team at ab
Speaker 1: Imbev saw this coming for years. It has seen strong
Speaker 1: sales of so called light beers, lower in calories and
Speaker 1: with less alcohol than a standard brew. And from a
Speaker 1: business perspective, non alcoholic beer is all upside. It's a premium,
Speaker 1: high priced product, says Dave Infant, author of the booze
Speaker 1: industry newsletter Fingers And in the US, the companies don't
Speaker 1: pay excise taxes on beer with no alcohol, so the
Speaker 1: margins relative are really attractive, and a beer could be
Speaker 1: the wind that the industry sorely needs now. So ab
Speaker 1: Imbev's scientists went back to the lab, hunting for a
Speaker 1: new way to make beer without alcohol that tasted as
Speaker 1: good as beer with it. They found a lot more,
Speaker 1: something that might explain not just how to make a
Speaker 1: new beer, but why people like it in the first place.
Speaker 1: If the science of beer enjoying has a unified field theory,
Speaker 1: this was the god particle. The key was the yeast.
Speaker 1: Yeast ferments, which is to say, it eats sugar and
Speaker 1: poops out carbon dioxide and alcohol. That is its whole
Speaker 1: ontological deal. And what if you could engineer a yeast
Speaker 1: that doesn't make alcohol at all? It would be a
Speaker 1: biochemical oxymoron, like a tree that grows bacon. In theory,
Speaker 1: such a yeast could be a building block for na
Speaker 1: negromdella and every other label on Imbev's shelf. To create
Speaker 1: this mycological unicorn, the company turned to one of the
Speaker 1: world's foremost scientists of beer, a yeast whisper of sorts
Speaker 1: named Kevin Verstrappin whose lab happens to be on the
Speaker 1: other side of town from ab Imbev headquarters. Led by
Speaker 1: its mad beer scientists, the company embarked on a quest
Speaker 1: almost Frankensteinian in its ambition and implications, with the potential
Speaker 1: to unlock not just non alcoholic beer but also ana wine,
Speaker 1: gin whiskey. The god particle of beer holds the potential
Speaker 1: to be infinite in its beneficence. Get some grain, usually barley, malted.
Speaker 1: That is, let the seeds germinate, so they start making
Speaker 1: enzymes that convert their starch into sugar. Grind that up
Speaker 1: and put it in boiling water weight add yease weight. Congratulations,
Speaker 1: you have made beer. Brewers are lovely nerds who delight
Speaker 1: in making things complicated, but basically that's it. Yet for
Speaker 1: all that simplicity, beer is also deceptively complex. Amid a
Speaker 1: zillion variations of method and recipe. Any given beer comprises
Speaker 1: not only the fizz of carbon dioxide and the sting
Speaker 1: of alcohol, but also flavor is drawn from the grain,
Speaker 1: from the bitter flowers of a plant called hops, and
Speaker 1: from the biochemical transformations of yeast. Yeast, specifically sachoronomi ss serrebisai,
Speaker 1: is found just about everywhere on Earth. It's the key
Speaker 1: to the foods that civilized human kind. Bread for one,
Speaker 1: beer for another. The first beer like drinks date back
Speaker 1: some eight thousand years, though brewers didn't know what yeast
Speaker 1: was until the mid eighteen hundreds. Early brewers simply relied
Speaker 1: on the alchemy of fermentation to turn little more than
Speaker 1: breakfast porridge into a flavorful beverage that also made people
Speaker 1: feel good and sold for good money. If yeast didn't exist,
Speaker 1: we'd have to invent it. By nineteen twelve, a b
Speaker 1: imbev had determined that the combination of flagging beer consumption
Speaker 1: and flavorless ana beer represented both of business and biotechnological opportunity.
Speaker 1: There was just one problem. Non alcoholic beers have historically been,
Speaker 1: in a word, bad brewers made near beers. By shortening
Speaker 1: fermentation time, the yeast made less alcohol, and the results
Speaker 1: tasted like watered down wheaties. No alcohol beer was quite stagnant,
Speaker 1: says De Shuter. Nobody has really put effort into R
Speaker 1: and D as De Shooter's team started digging in the tech,
Speaker 1: improved membranes and reverse osmosis like water purification could filter
Speaker 1: out alcohol. Heating beer with steam would cause the alcohol
Speaker 1: to evaborate. This new generation of NA beer was better,
Speaker 1: but still had some problems. Beer contains proteins and heating
Speaker 1: them produced dimethyl sulfide, the aroma of boiled vegetables, components
Speaker 1: that are not necessarily part of the fresh beer aroma.
Speaker 1: The shooter says, with the diplomat's touch, So we set
Speaker 1: ourselves the goal, the dream to make no alcohol beer
Speaker 1: as good as regular beer. That's a tall order. Ab
Speaker 1: Imbev is going to put NA beer into a bottle,
Speaker 1: That says Budwiser. Really, the shooter insists that this isn't
Speaker 1: about replacing Bud for a beer agnostic generation. It's about
Speaker 1: building something new. The way we measure that is with
Speaker 1: consumer tests. He says, as good as is just probing
Speaker 1: for preference in the consumer panel. If statistically your beer
Speaker 1: is as good as the regular beer, you achieve your goal.
Speaker 1: Craft brewers would let's just say bag to differ their nerds.
Speaker 1: They make what they want to drink, whether that means
Speaker 1: a classic British stout or aged sour beer fermented with ambient,
Speaker 1: funky yeast, nittered with hops that taste like bong water,
Speaker 1: and fill with a dash of siracha. They are making,
Speaker 1: and I say this in all sincerity, drinkable art ab
Speaker 1: Imbev is playing a very different game. Its NA beers
Speaker 1: can't be merely good. They have to be widely appealing,
Speaker 1: chemically stable, even amid the vagaries of international shipping, consistent
Speaker 1: year after year. When it comes to non alcoholic beer,
Speaker 1: that's really hard to do. Sure, ninety five percent of
Speaker 1: a beer is not alcohol, but that last five percent
Speaker 1: has always been the obstacle between a premium, scalable NA
Speaker 1: beer and wet breakfast cereal. Most of what we call
Speaker 1: flavor is actually smell. The tongue is a blunt detector
Speaker 1: of salt, sour, bitter, sweet, and the meaty flavor of umami,
Speaker 1: but the nose senses a far more subtle spectrum. Alcohol
Speaker 1: lights up all of that plus more. It is an
Speaker 1: aroma molecule, a flavor and a smell. It also triggers
Speaker 1: heat receptors in the mouth, and it has an unctious
Speaker 1: mouthfeel what a conswer might call body. So its absence
Speaker 1: leaves of big coal. Adding grains like oats and rice
Speaker 1: can amp up mouthfeel. But from the beginning of their
Speaker 1: foray a decade ago, the av Imbev researchers have been
Speaker 1: determined to stick with their beer's original ingredients. As a
Speaker 1: first step in backling over the gaps, they tweaked their
Speaker 1: brewing process to preserve long chain carbohydrates called dextrins. They're
Speaker 1: nearly tasteless, but they add viscosity to get alcohol out.
Speaker 1: The Shooter's team experimented with a variety of emerging techniques,
Speaker 1: all of which required expensive new equipment and lots of
Speaker 1: energy and water just to produce results that always lacked
Speaker 1: a certain genese qua. Except scientists do know quaw. Dissolved
Speaker 1: within the alcohol are hundreds of other beery flavor molecules,
Speaker 1: from the banana smell of isoamyl acetate to the Clovish
Speaker 1: spicing nsas of four vinyl guayacole. These volatile aromatic molecules
Speaker 1: give beer its flavor, and many are secondary metabolites that
Speaker 1: yeast produces during fermentation. Remove the alcohol and you remove
Speaker 1: them too. Only one solution was available add them back
Speaker 1: in afterward. Ruwers working on na beers squirted natural and
Speaker 1: artificial flavors into the products to cover a lack of
Speaker 1: flavor or mask their faults. More intense styles could pull
Speaker 1: this off with more panache, the toasty slash coffee aromas
Speaker 1: of a stout like guinness or the tropical fruit happiness
Speaker 1: of modern India pale ales. We can add other components
Speaker 1: that make it have more mouth feel. We can add
Speaker 1: alcohol adjacent chemicals, as Scott la Fontaine, a food chemist
Speaker 1: at the University of Arkansas who studies beer, that's where
Speaker 1: understanding fermentation and yeast biochemistry are essential to creating a
Speaker 1: beer like adjacent product. Attain's research suggests that the more
Speaker 1: a beer tastes like sodapop, the more Americans will like it.
Speaker 1: Not this American, for the record, And sure, the best
Speaker 1: beer adjacent products can be quite good. Not in my experience,
Speaker 1: they lose something as they sit in a glass. They
Speaker 1: taste good at the top, fine in the middle, and
Speaker 1: then well, I rarely finish them. Without the alcohol matrix,
Speaker 1: these flavors fizz away more quickly. The Shooter's team decided
Speaker 1: on a different approach. Yeas eat sugar and excrete alcohol
Speaker 1: and all those other flavors secondary metabolites. But what if
Speaker 1: a yeast made only those other flavors. A b Mbev
Speaker 1: needed a bacon tree. Luckily, the world has a lot
Speaker 1: of yeasts. The Lagger style beers, for instance, light, clear
Speaker 1: and popular, like Budweiser art made with S. Sara Visai,
Speaker 1: but with a different species, the hybrid s pastorianas. This
Speaker 1: is why breweries are so careful with their special yeast strains.
Speaker 1: When strains reproduce, they mutate, so brewers keep their yeast
Speaker 1: frozen and only scrape out tiny samples at a time.
Speaker 1: The original bast batch must never break containment. For me,
Speaker 1: the yeast is the soul of the beer. The shooter says,
Speaker 1: if you want to make a Stella Artois, you need
Speaker 1: to have the Stella artois yeast. The same goes for
Speaker 1: any of the other beers in the A b Imbev line.
Speaker 1: With human nudging, yeasts have evolved into wolfish apex predators
Speaker 1: that feast on the range of sugars we extract from grains,
Speaker 1: from smaller, simple, simpler ones like glucose and fructose, to bigger,
Speaker 1: more complex ones like maltose and malto trios. Brewing yeasts
Speaker 1: eat them all, but more demure species and strains exists too.
Speaker 1: These Pomeranians of the yeast world can't handle the big sugars.
Speaker 1: They still ferment and they create interesting aromatic molecules, but
Speaker 1: they produce far less alcohol. The shooters team tried one
Speaker 1: of these alt yeasts back in twenty seventeen, a yeast
Speaker 1: from the genus Pichia. During my visit, the shooter offered
Speaker 1: me a small plastic cup filled with the result, a
Speaker 1: sweet Beeri like liquid with strong notes of apple now
Speaker 1: and later candy. It was the wrong yeast. The na
Speaker 1: yeast of the future would be just as important to
Speaker 1: a b imbev as the one that makes stella, but
Speaker 1: the shooter and his team didn't have the background to
Speaker 1: find it. He needed help, someone with a uniquely tailored
Speaker 1: biochemical expertise. He needed a yeast whisperer. Kevin ver Streppen
Speaker 1: is the director of a lab with a name that's
Speaker 1: going to make you wish you chose a different major
Speaker 1: in college, the k u Leuven Institute for Beer Research.
Speaker 1: He didn't set out to pioneer beer flavor, pursuing a
Speaker 1: biological engineering degree with notions of delivering the next world
Speaker 1: changing vaccine. He eventually made his way to the South
Speaker 1: Africa lab of Itzach Pretorius, a geneticist studying yeast, specifically
Speaker 1: wine making yeast. Long story short, I loved it Astreppan
Speaker 1: says a student in the wine lab learning how to
Speaker 1: taste wine. That experience also gave Verstreppin his first sense
Speaker 1: of beer making as a biotechnology. So outwent by plans
Speaker 1: to come up with a cancer vaccine. He went back
Speaker 1: to k U Leuven and got a pH d in
Speaker 1: Applied biological sciences with a minor in beer. After stints
Speaker 1: at MIT and Harvard, where Verstreppin co created a widely
Speaker 1: wildly popular freshman seminar that used beer and brewing to
Speaker 1: teach basic biochemistry and bioengineering, Leuven offered him a job
Speaker 1: studying how yeiest's work from brewing beer to manufacturing pharmaceuticals.
Speaker 1: No one is doing more to link beer's sociocultural history
Speaker 1: with its high tech, non alcoholic future. Much of the
Speaker 1: equipment in Verstreppin's lab is designed to help understand yieese's
Speaker 1: chemical outputs. Refrigerator sized analytic engines can discern a roma
Speaker 1: and flavors with molecular precision. A seven foot tall, translucent
Speaker 1: cabinet contains a miniaturezed assembly line bristling with robot arms
Speaker 1: dabbing at tiny dishes, each executing thousands of tiny chemical
Speaker 1: reactions all at once. Firstreppan, tall and lean like a
Speaker 1: cyclist and wearing a vantgarde eyeglass frames, is an expert
Speaker 1: at cracking yets open to see what they can do.
Speaker 1: The Shooter's team tasked him with finding a yeast with
Speaker 1: a very specific set of skills, and back at his lab,
Speaker 1: he had a freezer full of a thousand different kinds
Speaker 1: of yeast, a genetic library of untapped potential abilities. The
Speaker 1: lab's high throughput screening technologies could flip through them like
Speaker 1: an old rolodex, looking for the right skill sets. You
Speaker 1: don't have to know the underlying genetic mechanisms. Ver Streppan says,
Speaker 1: you just have to find good parents. Anyone who follows
Speaker 1: horse racing where the Westminster Kettel Club understands breeding but
Speaker 1: in horses and dogs or even barley. Generating traits you
Speaker 1: want and sifting out those you don't can take years,
Speaker 1: not yease, they pick up new genes as casually as
Speaker 1: we might change shirts, and they breed fast. Consider how
Speaker 1: quickly a sour dough starter overflows its jar. Combine strains
Speaker 1: with interesting traits, grow them, test them. If you want
Speaker 1: one that's resistant to high temperatures, just pull them all
Speaker 1: into a hot bath. One survives. Guess what, that's your champion.
Speaker 1: Erristreppin says, with flavor, you do a small fermentation and
Speaker 1: measure the flavor components, or do a tasting, which is
Speaker 1: more precise. So that's what we do. Our Struppen's team
Speaker 1: started out with more than a thousand candidates. Weeding out
Speaker 1: the ones that still made too much alcohol got the
Speaker 1: list down to about twenty. Like a lot of wild yeats.
Speaker 1: Most of the survivors also produced fenels, molecules that, depending
Speaker 1: on your childhood, remind you of either dirt or band aids.
Speaker 1: Phenolic character is typically something we except in a specialty beer,
Speaker 1: but not in a logger. The shooter says they cut
Speaker 1: those two that left them with just two candidates. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: one manifested a tendency to kill any other yeast it
Speaker 1: came into contact with, thanks to its acquisition of a
Speaker 1: viral gene for a viscous toxin. That wouldn't matter unless
Speaker 1: the new yeast got into a legacy batch. But since
Speaker 1: they planned to make non alcoholic beer in the same
Speaker 1: breweries as alcoholic ones, they'd have to eliminate the trait
Speaker 1: they couldn't risk unleashing a serial killer. After a few
Speaker 1: final rounds of heat treating to stamp out the toxin gene,
Speaker 1: the champ emerged an ancient sarah VCI collected from plants
Speaker 1: in Southeast Asia, yeast's evolutionary point of origin. It had
Speaker 1: a stable phenotype if ate. It ate simple sugar, but
Speaker 1: didn't consume maltose, and so it made only the tensiest
Speaker 1: abound of alcohol. It wasn't phenolic. They didn't want to
Speaker 1: murder a yeast. As a last hurdle, the Shooter's team
Speaker 1: took the yeast to a b Imbev's brewery in Mexico,
Speaker 1: home to a massive fermenter capable of brewing over three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand gallons at a time. Flavor is fine, but
Speaker 1: it had to scale. When you make fifteen billion gallons
Speaker 1: of beer a year, there's no room for a dilettante.
Speaker 1: This year's delivered as advertised, the company nicknamed it Smart
Speaker 1: East and started brewing. Belgian beer is very traditional, but
Speaker 1: the tradition is constant experimentation. This is the point Ivan
Speaker 1: Debates wants me to absorb as we sit in the
Speaker 1: pub attached to its brewery, Roserie de las Sin, on
Speaker 1: an industrial stretch of the Brussels Canal near the trendy
Speaker 1: gar Maratin. Designed by Debts and its business partner. It's
Speaker 1: a concrete walled beer cathedral with giant windows showcasing all
Speaker 1: the steel tanks and pipes. Next door, we're sipping a
Speaker 1: bier called Pettibruba, his version of below alcohol brew at
Speaker 1: two point five percent alcohol by volume. Its right, hoppy
Speaker 1: and cheerful. I did that selfishly to save my liver.
Speaker 1: Debetz says, I never worked so hard on a recipe
Speaker 1: in my life. As Tibet's tells it, Belgian beer has
Speaker 1: always refracted styles from around the continent. In fifteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: Bavaria enacted what was effectively an early national food safety law,
Speaker 1: the Rhine Heiscobote or Purity Order, mandating that beer, a
Speaker 1: critically important regional food stuff, be made only with water, barley,
Speaker 1: and hops. Belgium combined this Bavarian rigidity with English facility
Speaker 1: into lower alcohol, sessionable bruise and Southern styles full of wine.
Speaker 1: Like esters. The oldest Belgian beers, like the Lambics, relied
Speaker 1: on spontaneous fermentations using ambient yeasts with funkier, weirder flavors.
Speaker 1: When training introduced in ingredients like annis coriander or the
Speaker 1: peel of the bitter cacao orange, Belgians threw them into
Speaker 1: the mix. It makes sense, in other words, that Belgians
Speaker 1: would be working on the non alcoholic future of beer.
Speaker 1: Brewing innovation is inextricable from the culture. It's the home
Speaker 1: of meccas like the San Sistus Abbey, whose West Veretrin
Speaker 1: twelve is by some lights the best beer period In
Speaker 1: the city of Bruges. A brewery founded in fifteen sixty
Speaker 1: five constructed a two mile underground beer pipeline from its
Speaker 1: brewery to its bottling plant so that its trucks wouldn't
Speaker 1: disturb the medieval downtown. You have to respect a country
Speaker 1: where every individual brew has its own specially shaped glass. Alcohol,
Speaker 1: tax policy, fashion and new science can all redirect the
Speaker 1: development of merging styles. A sociology of taste as Tibets
Speaker 1: elegantly puts it, but he worries that non alcoholic bruise
Speaker 1: will always be missing a certain something. The techniques are way, way,
Speaker 1: way better than even fifteen years ago, he admits. Still,
Speaker 1: I believe the base product is not so appealing, and
Speaker 1: yet the run away success of the non alcoholic craft
Speaker 1: brewer Athletic suggests that may just be the connoisseur ship talking.
Speaker 1: Not only is Athletic the biggest NA brewer in the US,
Speaker 1: it's the country's eighteenth largest brewer overall, with twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four sales of one hundred thirty million dollars and a
Speaker 1: valuation of eight hundred million dollars. One big reason is
Speaker 1: that people actually like to drink it. Athletic is notably
Speaker 1: close mouthed about how it makes its beer, unusual in
Speaker 1: an industry known for co operation and openness, and it's
Speaker 1: still a munchkin compared to a b imbev, but it's
Speaker 1: persuasive proof of market and as an added economic inducements.
Speaker 1: It's legal for brewers to advertise NA brands alongside popular
Speaker 1: sports like Formula one, raising appeal to the mainstream in
Speaker 1: ways that even the King of Beers can't smart yeast
Speaker 1: may solve a specific corporate problem, but the idea, the
Speaker 1: concept of new yeasts for new beers might transform the
Speaker 1: way we think about flavor writ large. Even with all
Speaker 1: the high tech analytic and sensory equipment in beer Streppan's lab,
Speaker 1: assessing something as complex as beer requires the nose and
Speaker 1: tongue of a trained human expert, some incapable of describing
Speaker 1: its characteristic aromas with poetic precision using a sheared, quantifiable vocabulary.
Speaker 1: Where this team term means that smell toasted caramel, grapefruit rind,
Speaker 1: sour dough bread to define the various distinct sensations in
Speaker 1: a single sip of beer, that's not me. I'm just
Speaker 1: a rider who has consumed a lot of beer. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: for a Strepan has invited me to sit in on
Speaker 1: an evaluation of a couple of the candidate's yeasts he's
Speaker 1: working on it's time to drink beer for signs. His
Speaker 1: team tucks me into a private, studied carol like one
Speaker 1: you'd find in a library. I'm served ambd er amber
Speaker 1: glasses of beer with numbers affixed to them and a
Speaker 1: sheaf of worksheets that gives me sat flashbacks. It's harder
Speaker 1: than it sounds. Both beers tast like well beer, but
Speaker 1: the worksheets want to know much more. I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: rate their maltiness on a scale of one to nine,
Speaker 1: but also is it malty like cereal or like bread
Speaker 1: crust or caramel? Is it hoppy like grapefruit or like
Speaker 1: pine resin any smell of banana? Do I text detect sulfur?
Speaker 1: Actually one was more sulfury. I checked boxes frantically. My
Speaker 1: reporting notes say only I'm too slow. These are the
Speaker 1: subtle differences between a mind blowing, transnational non alcoholic beer
Speaker 1: of the future and one you'd poured down the drain.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty four, Verstreppen's teen chemically analyzed two hundred
Speaker 1: fifty Belgian beers and crunched data from a hundred eighty
Speaker 1: thousand online reviews, which they then combined with judgments from
Speaker 1: the lab's trained panel. The ones I sat in with
Speaker 1: and used machine learning algorithms to detect commonalities. The Belgian
Speaker 1: beers that people prefer are all likely to have higher
Speaker 1: levels of protein lactic acid, the sour in sour beers
Speaker 1: like lambecks, and the molecules ethyl acetate, a kind of
Speaker 1: solventy chemical smell, and flural honeyed ethyl fenlactate. Add a
Speaker 1: concoction of those notes to a non alcoholic beer and
Speaker 1: people will say they like it just as much as
Speaker 1: a regular one. Ristreppen says he hopes the mixture of
Speaker 1: aromas his machine learning work has produced will go beyond
Speaker 1: creating post structural beer like sensations. This concludes readings from
Speaker 1: National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader has been Marsha.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, Keep on listing, and have a
Speaker 1: great day.