Homepage

Beer, Re-Imagined How Biology and Craft Carry Belgium’s UNESCO Beer Heritage Forward. By Justin Jin

Photographs by Justin Jin

A barrel of beer gets paraded to a ceremonial blessing during the annual Belgian Beer Weekend in Brussels. Tradition runs deep here — and yet the country's total beer consumption has plunged by 50 percent in the past half century.

Kevin Verstrepen's lab at the University of Leuven in Belgium is ground zero for a new approach to brewing nonalcoholic beer that could reinvigorate a flagging industry.

Yeasts eat sugar and excrete alcohol along with the secondary metabolites that help give beers their distinct flavor — but what if you could breed a yeast that only excretes the flavors and not the alcohol? Verstrepen's lab started out with 1,000 candidates and tested all their powers until they found a winner.
For all the cutting-edge analytic and sensory tech in Verstrepen's lab, he and his team still rely on the palates and expertise of human tasters to assess the complexities of their beers and judge how close they come to achieving their goals.

The pursuit of quality low-alcohol and nonalcoholic beer has consumed the entire industry, for global brands like AB InBev's Stella Artois, using a vacuum distillation process (see photo above) to prize-winning craft brewers like Ronald Mengerink who still follow traditional barrel-aged methods (see photo below).

Glen Ramaekers, a top Belgo-Filipino chef & sommelier, prepares a traditional Belgian meat stew with beer at The Brasserie, a prominent restaurant in central Brussels.
A priest blesses a barrel of beer inside the Brussels Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula as part of the annual Belgium Beer Weekend.
Homepage