A Metabolomic Approach to Beer Characterization.

Nicola Cavallini,Francesco Savorani,Marina Cocchi,Rasmus Bro

doi:10.3390/molecules26051472

Abstract

The consumers’ interest towards beer consumption has been on the rise during the past decade: new approaches and ingredients get tested, expanding the traditional recipe for brewing beer. As a consequence, the field of “beeromics” has also been constantly growing, as well as the demand for quick and exhaustive analytical methods. In this study, we propose a combination of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and chemometrics to characterize beer. 1H-NMR spectra were collected and then analyzed using chemometric tools. An interval-based approach was applied to extract chemical features from the spectra to build a dataset of resolved relative concentrations. One aim of this work was to compare the results obtained using the full spectrum and the resolved approach: with a reasonable amount of time needed to obtain the resolved dataset, we show that the resolved information is comparable with the full spectrum information, but interpretability is greatly improved.

Highlights

Molecules 2021, 26, 1472. https://The interest expressed by the consumers towards food consumption [1] and related aspects such as production [2], food pairing [3] and consumer experience [4] has been on the rise during the last decade
In addition to Principal component analysis (PCA), in order to get a deeper insight of the similarity and clustering tendency of the studied beer samples, other unsupervised methods such as projection pursuit (PP), t-distributed stochastic neighboring entities (t-SNE) and co-clustering were applied obtaining results inferior (PP) or similar to PCA (t-SNE, co-clustering)
We have illustrated the potential and efficiency of using an interval-based approach, especially from the point of view of the grouping information that can be extracted from a set of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra, when properly processed

Summary

Introduction

The interest expressed by the consumers towards food consumption [1] and related aspects such as production [2], food pairing [3] and consumer experience [4] has been on the rise during the last decade. A large number of new products is introduced into the market every year in a self-sustaining cycle of offer and demand coupled with a healthy desire to experiment. This is true in the field of beer production where the traditional minimum recipe for brewing beer from water, malt, hops, and yeast gets constantly twisted and expanded. To meet the demand of both quick and exhaustive analytical methods for quality control [9,11] and sensory evaluation [12], many analytical techniques have been employed so far: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy [13,14,15,16,17,18,19], gas chromatography (GC) [20], gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) [21,22], mass spectrometry (MS) [23], near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy [24,25,26], ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy [27,28,29], electronic tongue [30], MS electronic nose [31], middle-range infrared (mid-IR), optical-tongue [32] and fluorescence spectroscopy [33,34,35,36]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion