Barley key to perfect beer flavour: study

Barley contributes to the flavour and aroma of beer, according to the a study which debunks the widely-held brewing trade opinion that the malting process makes a perfectly flavoured pint.
Most brewers select varieties of barley chiefly based on their suitability for the malting process and the efficiency with how barley is turned into sugary malt.
Additional flavour enhancements such as fruit, coffee, and spices are added to enhance the taste of the alcoholic beverage.
However many brewers insist that certain barley varieties contribute to flavour above and beyond the malting process.
In addition to genetics, they believed, environment and location - what the wine industry calls terroir - also played a part.

This opinion has been proved right in the study by researchers from the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University (SLCU) in the UK.

"The malting process directly impacts the wider profiles of flavour - how you get a pale ale, lager, or a porter - but what this study shows is that subtle flavour profile of the barley variety selected carries through that process," said Matthew Moscou, from SLCU.
"This provides the motivation to look into our seed base and start looking at those cultivars that were grown in the past and asking what kind of flavour profiles we can bring into modern breeding," Moscou said.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, set out to test the theory that barley cultivar and the place it is grown can affect beer flavour.
First, researchers selected two barley cultivars Full Pint and Golden Promise, which have entirely different flavour profiles when used to brew beer.
The cultivars were crossed and modern breeding techniques used to create a population of 200 lines of barley to observe useful field traits.
To test the hypothesis that "terroir" applied to barley flavour, they grew populations across three sites in the US.
The barley was harvested micro-malted and micro-brewed using a customised scientific approach that ensured consistency between batches.

Around 150 beers were prepared for sensory testing using a trained panel - people with sensitive palates employed by the brewing industry who know how to differentiate between a flavour wheel of 10 descriptors.
The descriptors were: cereal, colour, floral, fruit, grass, honey, malt, sweet, toasted and toffee.
These qualitative tests on the beers and control beers were used to understand how genes, location, and the malting process influenced flavour.
DNA analysis showed genes in varieties associated with flavour and genes associated with malting suitability were in separate parts of the barley genome.
The study found that the genetic effect was larger than the environment.

"Barley varieties make different contributions to beer flavour, growing environment can have an effect, variety flavour contributions have a genetic basis and variety contributions to beer flavour develop during malting," researchers said.