Dr. Ethan Tsai Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Ask a Scientist. This is the podcast for kids and adults to ask scientists questions about anything they want to know. There are so many scientists out there doing a lot of cool scientific research. In the news, we’re constantly hearing about scientists and their ideas and where those ideas are going to take us in the future. But just who are these scientists? In this podcast, we will learn a little more about who they are and what inspires them as scientists.
I’m your host, Victoria. Every other week, I sit down and ask a different scientist questions written by you, the listeners, and by students from classrooms throughout the country.
Victoria:
Hello listeners. Welcome back to the next episode of Ask a Scientist. We have a very special guest this week. Dr. Ethan Tsai is a bear scientist. Now I know many of you listening are not yet old enough to drink beer. But as you listen to the episode, I encourage you to think, not just in terms of beer, but in terms of science of things that we drink and things that we eat. There are so many aspects of science that relate to making drinks and producing food. And we don’t always think about that. So, Dr. Tsai is here to tell us all about that today.
Thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Tsai:
Thanks for having me.
And you’re absolutely right. You know, just because I’m a scientist that studies beer, or I guess you could say, you know, colloquially a beer scientist, it doesn’t mean that all I do is beer. A lot of this stuff, like you said, applies to a lot of different things that are outside of beer. You know, the provenance of beer, really parallels a lot of the provenance and the science of things that we consume all the time that are fermented. Everything from cured sausages to cheese, right, kombucha, a lot of different things are fermented, right? That type process that creates beer creates a lot of different things that we all consume and quite a bit of it.
Victoria:
Yeah. Yeah. So many of my favorite foods are fermented.
Dr. Tsai:
Yep. So many of mine as well, right. Everything from stuff like kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt, obviously, kefir, all sorts of stuff.
Victoria:
Yeah. All right.
But before we get to the questions, do you want to give the listeners a little bit of information about your background and your career?
Dr. Tsai:
Sure. You know, I’m kind of an unorthodox guy, which really fits into the beer industry. The craft beer industry or beer in general really is, when you think about it, as far as the history goes, it’s a pretty ragtag bunch of people that, well, you put your money where your mouth is, you think you have great ideas, go ahead and make it, let’s see if it works. Maybe it kills some people, maybe it doesn’t, who knows. You know, and you drink it, you taste it, you see if it’s good, if it works out. And it really kind of, is almost especially, you know, for a state like Colorado, this Wild West of, let’s just make a bunch of stuff and see what it’s like. There’s a very frontiers man. I guess you could say, you know, Wild West attitude. it doesn’t matter what your background is, it doesn’t matter who you are, right, gender or race or anything like that. it’s very much a discipline, I guess you could say that, is egalitarian in that regard.
Victoria:
(General question to give kids some background – What is beer?)
That’s awesome. All right. And then now to jump into our beer conversation. To start off, if you want to just kind of speak generally about beer for the kids listening, who might not have ever had beer, if you could tell us a little bit just what is beer?
Dr. Tsai:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, to take a couple steps back, I guess. You know, my background is in materials chemistry, right? So if there’s anything that seems kind of weird, just go ahead and like interject and I am happy to simplify.
That being said, you know, beer is just, well, I mean the easiest way to define beers, the same way that the US government defines beer, which is it’s a liquid that has alcohol in it more than half a percent of alcohol. And it’s a beverage that is predominantly, the majority of it is based on malted barley.
That’s about it. That’s a beer.
Really, you know, it’s easiest to describe by saying if you were to take a very kind of elaborate oatmeal, and take all of the solid stuff out of it, and then you let it rot. That’s it.
Victoria:
That’s funny. I like that.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah, I mean, technically speaking, someone had to think of that. Brought into that, and then, you know, it goes in your mouth, right. You put it in your mouth.
Victoria:
(Kelly – How is beer made?)
And that I think is a good lead in to Kelly’s question, which is how is beer made?
Dr. Tsai:
I mean, we could be as flippant, you know, we could be as facetious and say, I just said it right. You make water and then you let it rot. Technically speaking, the way that beer is made is actually not too far off from that.
So, beer is made by taking grain. And it can be a variety of different grains. Typically, the dominant ingredient is a malted grain of some kind, and we can talk about malting later. But suffice it to say, grain has to be malted.
We use hot liquid, hot water, usually, what we call in the business hot liquor. And we use that to extract sugar, protein, and carbohydrates from that malted grain. And then we try to remove as much of the stuff that tastes terrible out of it. And we do that by boiling it. And once it’s done boiling, once we were done adding in things like hops or different plants or fruit or spices that we want to add in, we take all the solid stuff out, we filter it all out, so that you get a completely solid free, if possible, liquid. And it’s just basically elaborate sugar water, right? It’s just elaborate sugar water.
You throw in yeast, which is a fungus. And that yeast will just consume all that sugar, and convert that into CO2, carbon dioxide, alcohol, and some heat, predominantly, those are the three big things. And if you let that happen long enough, you know, you’ve got beer out of it. Right? Hashtag let it rot.
Victoria:
Nice. Very cool. Now I understand how beer is made.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. That’s basically it. Right.
You know, historically speaking, archeologically, you know, there’s a good chance, right? I would say, not too terribly debated, you know, it’s not too contentious an idea or concept, that at some point somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, right in the middle East, bread probably was sitting in some jar somewhere and it probably got super duper moist and wet and gross. And, yeah, that liquid started to get moldy. Right. It rotted and someone decided, yeah, let’s drink it. Why not? You know, I guess I’m really thirsty. Let’s drink this potentially disgusting stuff, and it made them feel real good, and they decided to keep doing it.
Victoria:
That’s funny. Yeah. I guess, if it’s good, try it again, do it again.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. Right. I mean kind of is the concept of selection, right? Natural selection.
Victoria:
(Elizabeth – What is the chemistry of beer? What are the chemical in beer?)
Yeah.
All right, let’s see this next question. We can keep going with the questions here. Elizabeth wants to know what is the chemistry of beer? What are the chemicals?
Dr. Tsai:
Wow, that’s a pretty wide, far-reaching, I guess you would say territory. So I think that the easiest way to think about this is in terms of, for us in the beer industry, especially in the craft beer industry, I would say that we would probably classify these things in three ways, right?
There are flavors, chemicals that you can get from the yeast or whatever microbe you’re using to create your beer. And those things can be classified as ah flavors or flavors that are desirable. That are related to what I guess you could say would be the metabolic exhaust, the consequences of the microbes, predominantly yeast usually, undergoing their fermentation activity, right, their metabolic activity. And they’ll make stuff, and they’ll shoot it into whatever the liquid is. What you could call the wart, green beer, mother liquor, whatever you would like to call it. Right. They’ll just bleed it out in there.
There are natural chemical reactions that occur, you know, outside of what the yeast can do. There are a bunch of different chemical reactions. There are reductive reactions, you know, reductions, oxidations, condensation type reactions. And those can lead to a whole bunch of different chemical compounds that are naturally in beer when you drink it, but are not a consequence of the yeast doing anything. Okay.
And there are also based on what you put into, you know, what we would call an adjunct. Maybe they’re hops, maybe they’re flora, maybe it’s vegetables, maybe, you know, it’s fruit, whatever thing, spices we add in there, mushrooms, you know, whatever it might be. There are compounds that are, a consequence of those particular plants or additional fungi, especially when it comes to plants. Right? I mean, hops are a huge, huge component of beer. And so, the dominant chemicals that come from hops or come from flowers or spices are phytochemicals, right? These are things that come from plants and the metabolic activity of plants. And so, the overwhelming, you know, a set of chemical compounds that come from those sources are terpenoids, you know, things that are derived from turpines, which are phytochemicals that plants make.
There’s a lot. It’s a ton.
Victoria:
Yeah. Well, I won’t make you list all of them. But that was a good one.
Dr. Tsai:
That’s good. There’re a lot.
Victoria:
(Aaron – How do you develop new beer flavors?)
This next question is sort of getting into that a little bit. It’s about beer flavors. And Aaron wants to know how do you develop new beer flavors?
Dr. Tsai:
If we want to talk, you know, kind of flippantly, how do you develop new beer flavors? Really, you know, maybe funny answer or jokey kind of answer is you just drink a lot of stuff, right.
And to be fair. Yeah. I mean, a lot of flavor ideation, the way that you think of new flavors and bringing new flavors to the table is a lot of the same stuff that, you know, a chef would participate in when they want to make a new dish. The only way you can know what flavors are out there to play with is to taste them, right, is to, to experience those flavors.
And so, as a beer scientist, right, or as a brewer, you draw a lot of inspiration from nature. For example, you know, tastes every fruit you can, taste every spice you can, drink someone else’s beer and see what it tastes like. If there’s something in there, an element in there that you really like, and you want to incorporate into your own beer. That’s something you can learn from.
There’s a lot of inspiration from the cocktail industry from spirits, right? Just because I make beer or my friends and our industry makes beer, doesn’t mean we don’t have something to learn from the people who make whiskey, or the people who make gin, or the people who make, you know, wine. All of those products are also very popular. I guess you could say the adult crowd, or the elicit under age drinker. But, you know, those flavors are there and they persist and they’re popular for a reason. There’s no reason for us as brewers to neglect them as well.
And certainly there’s always, you know, like I said before, when we take our inspiration from nature, there’s also just the idea that there are always going to be new strains of yeast or hops or grain that we could possibly be using. And how those things are manipulated, you know, grain by maltsters, or people who grow hops, you know, globally, the way that we manipulate them genetically, and the strings that we cultivate, all have different types of flavor profiles and can be used in different ways.
And certainly yeast. They generate, each individual strain of yeast will do different things under different conditions.
Victoria:
Wow. Lots of. Lots of options.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. I mean, if you want to make, if you’re constantly thinking about how do I create a new breed of dog, you know, how would you think of doing that? How would you develop a new, you know, I guess you could say designer breed of dog. Well, there are a lot of different ways. We certainly have, you know, we just saw the Nobel Prize for CRISPR CAS. We could approach it from that, you know, idea, we could incorporate, you know, more wild canines or we can take the canines that we know now and try to cross breed them in varieties of different ways to make new breeds of dogs.
Victoria:
Yeah. It’s like how there are so many doodles now. Cause everything’s good with the poodle.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah, there are a lot of doodles. Everywhere. Just doodle everything.
Victoria:
(Tim – Why are some beers dark and some light in color?)
Alright, let’s see. Tim wants to know why are some beers dark and some light in color.
Dr. Tsai:
Okay. There are two ways to approach answering that question. And oftentimes when people ask me questions like these, I’ll basically ask them back, socratically, do you want the answer that’s real, or do you want the answer that makes you happy?
If you want to talk about like, just a very blunt happy answer. Some beers are dark, and some beers are light, because of the ingredients. There you go, that’s it.
If you want to be more realistic about it, the color of the beer is related to, you know, obviously the ingredients, but predominantly from a standpoint of two potential particular places where we can insert color.
So during the brewing process, if we want to look at the base of the beer, you know, when we make something liquid that we ferment, that we let rot called wart. When we make the wart, we could theoretically make it using grains that are very pale in color, or grains that are very dark in color. Grains that are dark in color are dark in color because they undergo not just the malting process, but also involved in the malting process might be kilning, which is kind of like a light oven toasting, right, or roasting, like what you would see with coffee. Now, both of those two activities engage in what’s known as Maillard conversion or Maillard caramelization.
So when sugar is subjected to high temperature in the presence of nitrogen, things like protein, okay, you get Maillard caramelization. And this is a lot like, you know, when you bake your cookies. If you were to eat the cookie dough raw, with no Maillard caramelization going on, you know, if anyone were to eat just raw cookie dough, it tastes very sugary, and there’s a certain, you know, sweetness. There might be a light graininess that comes from the flour in the cookie dough. But if you were to make the actual cookie, bake the cookie, and you see that browning and toasting, that caramelization that goes on from the Maillard reaction, you develop a much deeper, right, flavor profile that goes with it, right? The difference between the actual baked product, delicious, and eating raw cookie dough, possibly delicious, I wouldn’t know, because I find it reprehensible.
Beer, right, can be dark or pale, because you may or may not be using more of the malt that it undergoes roasting or, you know, heavier kilning that creates more of these Maillard products that causes it to be darker and darker. Or you may be using malt that doesn’t have as Maillard, you know, caramelization going on during the multiprocessing. And so it will be a much paler color for the beer.
Now you could also just insert in, right, something that’s just dark color. Right? What if you threw in, I don’t know, let’s just say, a boatload of cherry juice or extract, right. It’s going to be a really dark color, and it could just be dark for that reason. Right. Or let’s just say, for example, maybe you added in a boatload of maple syrup and blackstrap molasses, something, or really dark brown sugar, or a dark turbinado sugar. That color will then just also influence, you know, the color of the beer.
But those are two ways that you can get that dark color, you know, whether it’s a darker beer or a lighter beer in color.
Victoria:
Okay. That makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. It’s a lot like steeping tea, for example. If you have a really dark tea, something that’s like an oolong tea, that’s very dark, and a black tea, and you steep it for a long time, you’ll get a very dark colored tea. But if you have a white tea, and you don’t steep it for that long, then you just have a much paler liquid, right?
Victoria:
(Joe – It seems that there is now huge number of different flavored beers, are these artificially flavored or do they use real foods for the added flavor?)
Yeah.
Speaking of adding things to the beer, Joe wants to know. It seems that there is now a huge number of different flavored beers. Are these artificially flavored or do they use real foods for the added flavor?
Dr. Tsai:
I guess we’ll just default to that question for a question. The real answer or do you want the answer that makes you happy, right?
The easy answer is yes.
The real answer is it really depends. So when you look at flavor, right, flavor really is this interesting thing where your body’s reaction, okay, to what you taste. Right? So we have the six things that we can taste, salt, sweet, you know, bitter, umami, et cetera. And what we detect as an aroma, right, what we smell. Those two things, our brain will interpret as an actual flavor profile, right? So when we talk about flavored beer, you can look at it from a standpoint of what was the actual flavor we’re talking about.
If you’re looking for something that is just, you know, this thing that is reminiscent of, I don’t know, watermelon. Could you use the actual watermelon? You could. Or you could also just use the artificial extract. That’s true. Do they both taste like two different, you know, impressions of what watermelon would be? Yes. One obviously just tastes like, I guess this is watermelon and the other one is, wow, that’s very watermelon, right. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that you have to use extract to get that, wow, I guess that might be watermelon versus real watermelon, which is, this tastes like a whole lot like watermelon, right?
Well, what I’m trying to get at is, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Now, bear in mind, right, that we said at the very beginning, beer is this thing that we take a bunch of sugar out, we get it from our grain, and we give it to the yeast, and they do their thing, right, they gobble it all up, and they fart out CO2 and alcohol. Right. But, some sources of flavor, especially things like fruit, right? They have a lot of sugar in there, and those compounds, those things that the fruit are expressing that give them that, you know, fruitiness, I guess you could say, yeast can consume, right. They’ll eat it up and they’ll convert it into something else.
And so for us as brewers, this oftentimes presents itself colloquially as flavors of fresh fruit, and flavors of fermented fruit. Right? There’s a difference between when you eat a grape, and it hasn’t fermented, and you taste grapes that are fermented, i.e. wine. And they’re two very different things, but they’re both grape, right?
So for beer, you may run into that issue. Procedurally speaking, where you might want to add certain flavors at a certain time. You want, maybe you want that fermented fruit kind of flavor. Maybe you want that type of fermentation, you know, character to the flavors that you’re trying to produce.
And then if you want to shore up. For example, some of that fresher fruit flavor or fresh flavors from more, you know, less fermented, you know, aspects of the thing that you added, and you might add in some artificial flavoring.
So it really depends on what you’re trying to do, right?
Victoria:
Yeah. Lots of lots of different options. It kind of makes me think of, I make hard candy as like holiday presents for people.
Dr. Tsai:
Oh yeah. You are very familiar then with exactly what I’m talking about. Adding on when you put stuff in there, it will taste very different.
Victoria:
Yep. Also what temperature things are when you.
Dr. Tsai:
Yes, exactly. We see this all the time, right?
If you’re cooking and you add garlic early and you sauté the garlic and you cook that down, that’s going to have, you have a very different garlic flavor, than at the very end of making that dish, you just firing a whole bunch of fresh garlic. Like these are very, very different flavors that are in there.
Could you achieve that by adding the real food in there? Sure. And the timing that you put it in at, right, the timeframe that we utilize these things, that will have a very specific flavor profile. And if you want to just simply add in that flavor directly, you could use an artificial flavor. But again, depending upon where you insert that into the process, you can get something, you know, very different.
And the two things are not necessarily going to be an equivalency, right. Using the artificial flavoring at point X and using a fruit flavor at point X is not going to mean that they’re exactly the same.
Victoria:
(Chris -How is lite beer made? What products are different in them?)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
And speaking of adding things in, or I guess maybe taking things out. I don’t know. Chris wants to know, how is light beer made? What products are different in them?
Dr. Tsai:
Okay, so let’s defind light beer. So for a beer person, a brew, a light beer could mean one of two things. Okay.
So a light beer, if we talk about L I G H T, typically means something that’s pale in color or lighter in color. So if that’s what, you know, it was being asked, we would just simply select whatever grains or whatever ingredients we have at our disposal that will be lighter in color.
If we’re talking about lite as L I T E, like Miller Lite or a Coors Lite, what that really means is that it has a very low carbohydrate content, right, a low caloric content.
Now, if we’re going to do that, right, you can imagine that alcohol that’s calories. The sugar we put in to give to yeast, to ferment. If there’s stuff that isn’t fermented or stuff that yeast can’t eat, that’s calories. Protein, that’s calories. God forbid you put fat into the beer somehow, that’s calories.
Right? So if we want to look at it from an lite, you know, perspective, you want to cut out as much caloric content as possible. So, for the more mature audience, right? For, you know, adult soda, like lower alcohol is one way that we can start to approach the conundrum of making a lite beer. Right. Michelob ultra, it’s not going to be like 6% alcohol by volume. It’s probably right around four, right. Cores Lite, right around four. Miller High Life, right around four. Right? All of those are essentially pinned at the lowest alcohol by volume content possible, because alcohol is calories, right?
Then on top of that, do you want to have a lot of residual sugar left in there? No. If sugar is calories, you want to get rid of as much of that as possible, right? Have all of your yeast consume all of that as much as possible, which means then that we’re probably going to need to use a lot of enzymes. That can provide the best route for digesting having yeast consume and utilize every last bit of sugar that’s in there. Because if you know that you can convert everything over into the alcohol, then the only thing that you can get calories out of is alcohol. And if you put that down to the lowest amount possible, then you have the lowest calories possible. That’s going to be the best lite beer calorically that you’re going to get to, in terms of just pure caloric content. Flavor wise? No guarantee, can’t talk to you about that. But as far as calories go, that’s, you know, predominantly how we would get to it.
You could also theoretically put in sugars that just literally are non-digestible sugar that your body can’t even consume. Right? So like, you can imagine there are some beers that have been made with stevia, right? It’s a zero calorie sugar. You can add that in and boost the flavor that way. There’s a brewery on the East Coast Dogfish Head, they use a Chinese monk fruit, that is a zero calorie sweetener, right? There are a lot of different ways you can do that, and you can alter the flavor profile that way, but keep the calorie count low.
Victoria:
Interesting. So I never thought about it. So those are zero calories because they just go right through you.
Dr. Tsai:
The sugar? Yeah. Zero calories sugar is just undigestible sugar.
Victoria:
Oh, interesting.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. Don’t think about it.
Victoria:
(Maggie – How is non-alcoholic beer made?)
Yeah.
This next question comes from Maggie. How is non-alcoholic beer made?
Dr. Tsai:
Wow. Okay. So NA beer, non-alcoholic beer, there are a lot of different ways that you can make it. Well, I don’t want it to sound like a lot of different ways. But generally speaking, the predominant, the fastest route, I guess you could say, to non-alcoholic beer is either, obviously, make the beer with alcohol in it and then take the alcohol out; or, beer comes from fermentation, pick a microbe that can ferment the stuff and make it taste like beer, but can’t make the alcohol. Right.
All right. Well, if that’s going to be the case, then, obviously the microbial route is probably going to be the trickiest because you have to find something. Then remember the US government defines beer as having an alcohol content greater than half a percent, which means non-alcoholic beer has to have an alcohol content of less than half a percent to be considered non-alcoholic. Well, good luck finding a microbe that’s gonna make somebody to taste like beer but it doesn’t make, you know, more than half percent, right.
Which means that the predominant route, you know, nowadays, I’d have to look at the market share, but I believe the predominant route now is to actually just make the beer, let it do, like put yeast in there, do the fermentation, and then remove the alcohol. And there are the two, I guess you would say, direct ways of doing that, is essentially to distill, right, heat the beer up, so that the alcohol evaporates off. Typically, we do that under massive vacuums so that we don’t have to heat the whole thing up too high, because that changes the flavor profile. And then the alcohol can be taken off that way. Or, you can try to completely filter the alcohol out using an incredibly expensive membrane filter that does not allow the alcohol to pass through. And then you can actually remove the alcohol that way. Generally speaking filtration is not ideal. It’s not a good way to produce a whole lot of the NA beer. Generally speaking, we just use these processes to heat the beer and remove the alcohol that way. I think as far as I know, that’s the predominant industrial way of doing it.
Victoria:
Okay.
Dr. Tsai:
Things change, you know, it’s an evolving industry. So, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens.
Victoria:
(Sierra – How do you get the gluten out of beer?)
Yeah.
Well, speaking of removing things from the beer, Sierra wants to know how do you get the gluten out of beer?
Dr. Tsai:
Ah, okay. So, gluten is a combination of two things that form the gluten protein. So you can imagine then, again, like making a non-alcoholic beer, either just don’t start with anything that can make gluten, or get rid of one of the things that causes gluten, right, or is responsible for forming gluten.
So, you could use enzymes, right? You could use enzymes that consume or destroy one half of the components that make gluten. There are enzymes that do that, and we use those enzymes quite a bit actually. As it turns out, if you want a beer that’s very, very clear, right, what we would refer to as a polished or very bright beer, that means you want to get rid of a lot of protein and gluten is a protein. So we have these enzymes and we use them quite a bit. If you ever see at a brewery, something that’s marked as gluten reduced, that’s because one of the enzymes that can do that work has been used and it takes advantage of a specific amino acid, and it basically cuts the protein at that amino acid. And when you chew apart one half of the components that can make gluten, you can’t make gluten anymore. So there’s no gluten, right? And in those cases that would be referred to as a gluten reduced beer. You’re not allowed to, legally speaking, you’re not allowed to call it gluten-free, even if you do a amino acid test. Because you started with something that had gluten or the potential for gluten in it, which means then that the only other way to make a gluten free beer is just start with ingredients that can’t make gluten.
And there are gluten-free beers that are truly gluten-free because they use grains that have no ability to form the gluten protein in significant if any really, you know, quantity. They will taste different though.
Victoria:
Yeah. That is good to know for people with gluten allergies.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah, that’s true. Now I’m not advocating, just to be clear, you can get a gluten reduced. Anecdotally speaking, I know that there are, and have met people who have identified Celiac disease, right, which means they’re very, very sensitive medically, you know, identified as having an allergy to gluten. And some of the gluten reduced beers actually are consumable, you know. They’ve taken the risk and they’ve found that they can consume those specific beers. So a gluten reduced beer could in cases in very real circumstances, be consumable by someone even with Celiac. But I’ve also run the situations, I know of personally people who have very severe cases of Celiac that even gluten reduced beer is a no-go, but gluten-free beer still is okay as long as they’re not actually using anything that has a gluten precursor in it.
Victoria:
That is very good to know.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. Drinking your own risk, but you know, just know that they will taste different.
Victoria:
(Roy – How is sour beer produced, and how does it differ from more traditional ales?)
Yeah.
All right. This next question. Speaking of beers that tastes different. Roy wants to know how is sour beer produced, and how does it differ from more traditional ales?
Dr. Tsai:
Okay. So if we want to be pedantic, some sour beers are actually more traditional than modern ales that we know of. So let’s not go there.
Sour beer is just beer with a very low pH, right. It’s a beer that has a lot of acid in it. Now, that being said, it doesn’t mean that beer doesn’t have acid in it. There are a lot of different organic acids that are in beer. It’s just that sour beer has more, typically, of organic acids, such as acetic acid, lactic acid, oxalic acid, malic acid.
Many of those that we’re very familiar with, right? So yogurt is tart or sour because it had lactic acid; vinegar has acetic acid, so it’s sour really; apples that are really like tart, like a Granny Smith apples are really kind of sometimes puckeringly sour sometimes for some people, or are considered really tart, that’s a lot of malic acid; and so forth, right.
So, yeast and other bacteria can generate those things. So we know of things, brewers will refer to them as LAB, lactic acid bacteria, so lactobacilli, the stuff that makes your yogurt. There are bacteria like AAB, acetic acid bacteria. And acidic acid bacteria are those that create acidic acid right, they make vinegar. Right. And so, yeast will create some lactic acid, they’ll create some acidic acid in some cases, and they can create some malic acid or oxalic acid just because of what they do normally.
But we don’t see that in a very large quantity. So to make sour beer, typically you need to then add in, or have some type of souring microbes. So some type of LAB or AAB, right. So, the process itself actually doesn’t change. You’re just throwing in the extra microbe.
Victoria:
That’s pretty cool. I love sour beer. So it’s really interesting to learn.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. I mean, theoretically, you could actually just make artificially sour beer by just saying, okay, great, take this regular beer, fire in a whole bunch of citric acid or a whole bunch of lactic acid or stuff like that, and just chemically make it sour.
But traditionally, if we want to use what would be considered more traditional methods, air quotes, traditional methods, you would use a LAB or an AAB, some lactic acid bacteria, or acidic acid bacteria. And this is common. Then when you start looking at traditional beer styles, like lambic beer styles, or fruit lambics like Kriek, you know, Flanders, Flemish, ales, Flanders, red ales, oud bruin, things like that, you know. And I’m rattling off all these terms that are gonna be pretty esoteric for a lot of people. But you know, you know, there are a lot of different beer styles that have these, you know, acid producing microbes, bacteria in there as well. People have probably heard of things like gose or Berliner weisse, you know, from Germany, that lactic acid bacteria.
Victoria:
(Roy – Why are tannins “bad” in beer but “good” in wine?)
Okay, cool. All right. Another question from Roy. Why are tannins bad in beer, air quotes, bad, in beer, but good in wine?
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. So. Happy answer? Meh, because. Real answer? It depends. Right. It really does depend. Because you know, when we look at tannin in beer, oftentimes we don’t like having tannin in beer because of predominantly what’s known as a consequence in body and mouth feel.
You can taste, you know, some people say that they can taste tannic material in there. It tends to present itself as almost like over steeped tea, but it presents more in mouth feeling, the body of the beer, than it really is in terms of like a flavor, right, for most people. And I’m not saying for everybody, but for most people. And, when you think about very tannic, heavy wine, like really, really deep, deep, dark red wine. Right. And you drink it. A lot of people say that, you know, it’s very tannic. And it’s light, it’s thin in terms of the body of the beer. Right? The viscosity of the beer is really, really, really, really low. So it’s very thin. And then in the mouth feel of the beer, they would say that it’s almost leathery or there’s a little bit of cotton mouth in there. There’s an astringency. And a lot of that helps to clear your palate. Erases a lot of that stuff in there. Now, in wine, depending upon the style of wine, that might be bad, right? If you want a dessert wine that presents itself as being rich and sweet, right? Yeah. Let’s just say you, you want to have like a cabinet style wine, or like port not wine, but if you were to drink port, do you want something that you know is going to be like someone’s stuffed a sock in your mouth? No. Right. You know, it really depends on what you’re looking for.
And the same thing applies for beer. When you look at beer, colloquially speaking as a nebulous thing that we, you know, this whole monolith of beer, tannins typically are considered bad for a large majority of the different types of beer that we drink. Because we don’t want to have that really thin body, we don’t really want to have that cotton mouth kind of, you know, feeling your mouth afterwards. We don’t want to have that artificial drying, right, sensation in your mouth.
Now that being said, you can imagine that if you have a beer that presents closer to wine. So things like sour beer is a good example, is tannin bad ? No, actually it’s perfectly fine, right? It actually is, because it’s presenting so close to wine, it actually is probably okay. And in fact it is right. But if you’re trying to drink something that has a very rich mouth feel and like big body with a very rich velvety mouth feel, like a big Imperial Stout. Do you want a lot of tannin in there? then the answer is no. It’s inappropriate because the body of the beer thins out, becomes very, very watery and thin. It’s not appropriate. It’s not what you’re expecting. And in fact, may ruin your experience. And if the mouth feel is almost like cotton mouth, or stringently drying in your mouth, then you know, that’s not a very good Imperial Stout then probably right. You want that cleansing perception to be neutral rather than something that feels like someone shoved a fistful of cotton balls in it.
Victoria:
(Aaron- How does temperature effect beer?)
(Sierra – What is the best temperature to consume a beer at?)
Yeah. That makes sense.
Well, switching gears a little bit, we’ve got a couple of questions coming up that are all about temperature. So these are two questions that kind of go together. One is from Aaron and one is from Sierra. Aaron wants to know how does temperature effect beer, and Sierra wants to know what is the best temperature to consume a beer at.
Dr. Tsai:
Wow. All right. So that’s a lot. So, if we want to look at how temperature affects beer, there are two ways that temperature can really affect beer, like really, really, really affect beer.
And so, I would say that probably the best thing to think about is, during the fermentation process, when we actually are making the beer out of the wart, temperature affects how yeast behaves, and depending upon how yeast behaves that can change the actual flavor profile of the beer, or, you know, the different chemical compounds that we detect when we’re drinking the beer.
And also, when you look at a finished product, there are certain chemical compounds that may or may not be good as far as flavor and aroma is concerned, and then might be really, really volatile. And if that’s the case, you want the temperature to be really, really low when you consume that beer, because the lower the temperature, the less, you know, volatile stuff you’re going to perceive, because it can evaporate out.
Right. So. You know, that’s that those are two different ways that temperature can affect the beer in terms of the flavors that are produced, as well as the flavors you perceive.
Now, generally speaking, as long as you’re doing everything, quote, unquote, correctly, then flavor production or things that could be produced as flavors, both good and bad flavors are going to fit a profile that you already know you want, which means then that in terms of the flavors you want the person who is drinking the beer to perceive that’s tackling one half the equation. The other half is then serving to address what Sierra is talking about, then is serving the beer at a specific temperature.
Now, for example, if we drink a lot of what is known as like, quote unquote cheap macro beer, so Keystone Light or, you know, God forbid like Old Milwaukee or something like that or Hamms, right? Yeah. If you’re from the Pacific Northwest, there’s Rainier Vitamin R if you’re from Washington or Olympia, right. These are all American light lager, is the style that it would fall under. Those beers are served very cold, for a reason, right? Because if you warm them up, if you really want to know what happens, buy a can of course, like pour out and just let it get hot, and then smell it and taste it, it will smell and taste very, very different than if you were to shove it into the refrigerator, wait for the mountains to turn blue, crack it open and slam it down. Right. Completely different flavor perception.
So, you know, when we talk about the temperature you want to consume the beer at, or serve the beer at, that also plays into that part of the equation, right?
And the old rule of thumb was whatever the temperature of the beer was made at is the temperature you should be serving it at, right. So. And when you think about a beer, like a lager, a traditional German lager, or European lager, those are actually produced, the most amount of time they spend at any given temperature is going to be a lager temperature, which is a lower temperature, right? So that typically is going to be the temperature you want to serve at because that’s where the best representation of all of those compounds and chemicals that you perceive as a Roman flavor are going to be naturally where they should be. Right. If you have a beer that’s fermented very hot or very, very warm, then you typically will serve it relatively close to that temperature, just because that’s where you’re going to get the most of the flavor, the perception of the different stuff that you want to actually experience from that beer.
Victoria:
Okay.
Dr. Tsai:
On the other hand, if you make a bad beer and you want to hide as much as you can, serve it really cold.
Victoria:
(Jane – Why do we drink beer cold but in England they drink it warm?)
Good to know.
I think that leads in well to the next question from Jane. Why do we drink beer cold, but in England they drink it warm?
Dr. Tsai:
So that’s technically a myth. Not all English beer is consumed warm. And for that matter, we’re not really talking about warm either. That’s also just like a relative term.
Again, based on what we were talking about before, you know, European, continental European lager spends a lot of its time at approximately 40 to 45 Fahrenheit. So, the rule of thumb was serve at, you know, close to 40 to 45 Fahrenheit, because that’s what the beer traditionally is at all the time anyways.
When you look at beer that comes from England or even American beer, right, what would be considered more like an American ale or a continental European ale, those are fermented at a higher temperature, typically anywhere from, you know, the fifties to sixties, sometimes as high as seventies in the case of the new stuff we see out of Scandinavia, out of Norway, as high as, you know, like 35 to 40 Celsius. So like 90 to a hundred Fahrenheit. So, they consume their beer really, really warm, right. And under those circumstances.
So when you look at English bitter, right, that’s served at, you know, 50 ish, you know, anywhere from low fifties, mid fifties, upper fifties. And so it’s not that the beer is warm, it’s just warmer than what, you know, a lager beer would be served at. But again, it’s a reflection of what are you trying to get out of the beer. And if the beer was fermented warm, you typically will serve it colder than what it was fermented at, but not like freezing cold, because if you do, you don’t get all the stuff that the yeast is expressing or the ingredients that you’re using to make that beer can express.
Victoria:
(Roy – Why does oxidizing beer cause it to go stale? Is there ever a benefit of oxidation during the brewing process?)
Okay, that makes sense. Good to know.
This next question comes from Roy. Why does oxidizing beer cause it to go stale? Is there ever a benefit of oxidation during the brewing process?
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. You know, to be pretty straightforward about it, oxidizing beer makes it go stale because there are a bunch of compounds that we detect that are responsible for what we perceive as staling. Oddly enough, one of them is also responsible for the taste of cucumbers. So yeah, or old people smell also. Hilariously it’s the same compound as old people smell, like in a nursing home. So anyways. Well, I mean, you know, old people are heavily oxidized people, and then there you go.
So, when you, when beer and all the stuff that could be in beer, when those chemical compounds see oxygen, that’s when you get oxidation, right? And the chemistry that happens can lead to a whole plethora, is wide variety of different chemical compounds. And some can taste bad, right. Now bear in mind though, it’s only going to taste bad if it reaches a certain threshold to be bad. Right? So like I said, small amounts of the stuff that is responsible for half, I guess you could say, of the cucumber aroma, is what, isn’t stale beer, right, quote, unquote oxidized or stale beer. Right. When it gets past a certain threshold level, and the other one is also present, you get cucumber, right? Without it, you get actually paper. You know the taste of like, if you were to chew paper or cardboard, like wet cardboard, the perception of wet cardboard, that’s stale and kind of earthy,But, you know, depending upon the concentration of that compound, right, you can get one or the other cucumbers, or UPS boxes. Right. And depending upon all the other stuff in solution.
That being said, like sometimes it’s a good thing, right? Oxidation of a lot of different types of terpenoid compounds, leads to flavors, and precursors for other aroma and flavor compounds that we perceive as being fruity, tropical, apple like, pineapple like, sometimes depending upon the compound, and then what it can do ex post facto, in terms of the chemistry, you can get things like coconut or a nondescript nuttiness, fruitiness that’s in there. In some cases, you know, some people will describe very heavily hopped beer as being catty. Right. And that’s because of a certain compound that at a low concentration is actually responsible for the aroma of like white flesh, nectarines, or peaches, or apricots in very high concentration. It’s basically cat litter, it’s like used cat litter.
Victoria:
Wow.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah, yeah. Cat pee.
But that’s what I mean is that the relative concentration of these compounds is what then impacts what you perceive as being flavor. And so, a little bit of oxidation actually can go a long way and can be beneficial in terms of creating these organic compounds that we perceive as being fruity, nutty, very different types of, you know, aromas, versus making the one compound that we perceive as just being cardboard or stalely. Right.
Same thing with wine, right? You can have stale wine, you can have heavily oxidized wine, but in the case of some red wines, you do want to force some oxidation because you can get some of these other additional flavor profiles that are very sherried, or, you know, port like, you know, in terms of their perception.
Victoria:
Yeah. I have a friend who really likes wine that has been like left out, you know, not corked for a couple of days. So.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah, some people really, really love that stuff. And when you look at beer consumers, or connoisseurs of beer that really love barrel-aged beer, right? Barrel-aged beer, a lot of it has those compounds that are associated with oxidation or staling because there’s a lot of oxygen, a barrel can’t keep oxygen out forever or even really very well compared to stainless steel. So.
Victoria:
(Roy -Is there any way to culture yeast to more readily favor anerobic metabolism/fermentation?)
Yeah. Yeah. That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about that before with beer.
And then this is another interesting question from Roy, and for anyone listening, Roy has also been a guest on the podcast, so you can check out his episode. Episode 15. Is there any way to culture yeast to more readily favor anaerobic metabolism slash fermentation, sorry, aerobic, not anaerobic.
Dr. Tsai:
Well, I would say that regardless of whether you want it to be aerobic or anaerobic. Yes. Technically we could create or culture yeasts, right, to, I wouldn’t actually say, readily favor, but be efficient or more efficient than the baseline under aerobic or anaerobic conditions. But that really, you know, kind of leads into, well, what do you mean by favor? Right? You theoretically could make a yeast that’s really good at aerobic work, but it’s terrible at anaerobic work. So you sacrificed the half of the behavior of the yeast that I need. But if you want the other way around, and you said, well, let’s readily favor anaerobic, right, metabolism or fermentation, then I’ve thrown away again the other half, right, of the behavior that I need.
Now, that being said, right. You know, I would say, yes, we can always culture yeast to do almost anything that we want, really, in terms of whether or not it is going to be a champion to be a little bit more, I guess you could say scientific about it, that it exhibits up-regulated behavior that is favorable for aerobic or anaerobic work or activity, metabolism, fermentation.
But, you know, just because you do that, doesn’t necessarily mean, if I understand where this question is kind of leading towards, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be more efficient or better at making beer. Right.
As a side note, right, lager yeast are incredible champions of anaerobic work. Right. Lager yeast are infamous for sitting in anaerobic conditions, and even at low temperature, right, what we would call cryo-tolerant, low temperature, and they just plug away and they just keep doing what they do, right? Ale yeasts, not really good at doing that, very poor at doing that right now. No one takes somebody from right Hawaii and throws them in McMurdo Station in Antarctica and expects them to do the exact same thing with the exact same efficiency. Same thing with lager and ale yeast, right? Lager yeast are fantastic champions of anaerobic work at low temperature. They’re just really slow. Right. So, are they good at it? They are favorable for it? Sure. They are. They’re really slow. Right. So it really kind of, you know, I don’t want to dodge the question, but I kind of depends on what you mean by favoring it, or whether the good at it or not, you know, so.
Yes. The simple answer is yes. But, from a practical standpoint, would you want to anyways? I don’t know.
Victoria:
All right. and now we can kind of switch gears and transition a little bit. There were some questions mostly from our younger listeners who don’t quite know as much about beer, who wanted to know,
Ethan:
Of course they don’t know about beer. That’d be really weird. Also, … illegal. They have really cool parents.
Victoria:
(Ryan – How did you become a beer scientist?)
That, that too.
Ryan wants to know how did you become a beer scientist?
Dr. Tsai:
The short answer is it just happened.
The long answer is, you know, I went through a pretty long period of time, like everybody else, where, went to college, got my doctorate and went to grad school, got my doctoral degree, you know, did the post doc, entered the workforce in industry and in academia. And there was a lot of soul searching, right? There was a lot of time that I spent some people would say, you know, maybe too much time. I don’t know. Maybe you have Asian parents and you can’t empathize, where your parents like why’d you take so long. But this is where it’s important for you to understand what you don’t want to do as much as what you do want to do. Right? So it took a while for me to really explore the things I don’t want to do and the things I don’t want to have to deal with as a scientist. Right.
And, one of the things that attracted me to beer was that on one hand, you know, would someone say, Oh, you’re a beer scientist. What does that really mean? Well, you could write me off as, oh, well, what does he actually study as a beer scientist? But it also implies how much is there to really explore as someone who is a scientist involved with just even fermentation, not just beer, but just fermenting things, food, beverages. There’s an incredible amount of unexplored territory. Right? If we want to look at this from a Star Trek perspective, I’m in the gamma quadrant right now, buddy. You can yeah be offering your core worlds, right. For those of you that are watching the Mandalorian, I’m in the outer rim. I get to play with all the cool people, right? I also don’t have a razor crest or, or beskar armor. I really wish I did. That’d be so much cooler. I would probably be get hired by way better breweries if I had beskar armor.
But anyways, look, so the bottom line is, you know, there’s a lot of unexplored territory and I found myself gravitating to being a beer scientist because there’s still so much stuff to learn. And, more importantly, there is a group of people, right? When it comes to scientists, brewers, beer drinkers even, right. People who brew their own beer, or their own wine, their own kefir, the people who do this at home, right. We’re all scientists in our own way. And everybody is always looking for and seeking out that knowledge and pushing those boundaries. And I couldn’t get that in, you know, or rather I should say, I wasn’t able to find that as readily in the STEM fields that I was participating in. And there were, I guess you could say artificial, to be polite about it, there were a lot of artificial barriers that were put in place, because of my ethnicity that made it, you know, more difficult for me to find the stuff that I really wanted to explore and of, you know, devote my scientific career to. And beer was just a place and a discipline that has a completely different outlook to that, where anybody can be a beer scientist. You don’t have to have a degree to be a beer scientist. And that’s the awesome part.
And also you can drink your experiments. That’s pretty cool. Like how many people can say, like, I can drink my experiment. Is that one a good experiment? I don’t know. Let me taste it. Nope, terrible. I’m gonna put it in the sink now. Right? How many people can go to a lab and say, oh yeah, I can’t wait to drink this cell culture. Well, that was bad. We use the wrong recombinant bacteria for that guy. Well, down the sink, let’s flush it. No, I don’t think that happens.
Victoria:
Yeah, I know a lot of science labs that you could do that in, and then you would immediately either die or get thrown out of the lab.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah, I know. I know.
Victoria:
(Ali – Did you always know you wanted to be a beer scientist?)
Yeah. This next question, you kind of already answered it. So I’ll change the question a little bit. Ali asked, did you always know you wanted to be a beer scientist, and so to kind of put a spin on it, I’ll change it to when did you know you wanted to be a beer scientist?
Dr. Tsai:
I think the part that really kind of kept it for me, there was maybe that. We’ll look at this from a comparative point of view. You know, my previous career, my prior career was, you know, in chemistry, specifically in organic materials chemistry. And so my academic career was that of being a professor of chemistry and organic chemistry especially. And anyone who has taken organic chemistry at the collegiate level probably could say, yeah, that sucked. That was a terrible class. And I hated my professor. Yeah. So that was the expectation, right, going into my class that, you know, my class is going to be terrible and it didn’t matter what I did to try to, you know, assuage students or calm them or try to provide some relief, anything that I did. Right. Even if I gave them good grades, right. Even if I taught them, they learned, they excelled in my class, I gave them great grades. There was always this, you know, negative harsh bent to it, you know, and a lot of crime. On my part too. Right. I cried all the time in my office. I wanted to help people. I really wanted to help people, and, you know, give them something in return, you know. And, there were many times where I would get as the organic chemistry professor, a lot of, you know, compliments from students, I would get letters and notes back, and that was very fulfilling, right? It was incredibly fulfilling. But the barrier to entry to experience those things, and I’ll be frank about it, the blatant racism, and discrimination and bullying that I experienced in essentially the old boys’ club, right, of many of the STEM fields was something that was, at the end of the day, not worth it.
And I was standing on a brew deck. Okay. So this is like a platform, you know, two stories tall, it was looking down at the taproom, and I could sit there and watch people that were literally drinking beer that I had helped create, right, you know, pints of beer that I had made with my colleagues in the brewery. And not one person that was there was drinking the beer and then openly weeping. And it wasn’t like I gave back to my class a whole bunch of, you know, exam results. These are people who were there, who are drinking beer, enjoying it, and actually appreciating what I was producing, and exploring, and, you know, giving to them as kind of like an offering of this is the culmination of a lot of the work that I’m putting into it. And people were enjoying themselves. For them, it was a way for them to escape, or, you know, feel good. And, that was not something that I had experienced much of, and the barrier to entry for that experience was much, much lower. Right?
Victoria:
Yeah. I’ve definitely been crying over a grade and had a beer and stopped crying and was much happier afterwards.
Dr. Tsai:
Oh yeah. I’ve been in that position too, only as a professor, trying to figure out how I can, you know, make the class better. How can I do better by my students and sitting at a taproom, crying, after giving students their grades, and seeing the devastation, you know, unleashes on these students’ faces and then having an ugly cry, drinking a beer with some friends, and cheering up, right? The amount of science that goes into a pint is nothing compared to, you know, seeing people consume that experiment and deriving an incredible amount of joy out of it. It definitely makes it worth the effort of, you know, conducting the experiments, doing the research, looking and learning and exploring all of those things.
Victoria:
(Jamie – Do you drink a lot of beer when you are at work?)
Yeah.
All right. Let’s see more beer questions. Jamie wants to know, this is kind of fun one. Do you drink a lot of beer when you’re at work?
Dr. Tsai:
Yes and no.
So if you say drink, as in I consume it for fun and like, Ooh, beer, I’m a beer scientist, I get to drink a lot of beer. No.
But, if I have to taste beer. Yeah. Like that’s part of the experiment, right? It’s not just the scientific portion of breaking beer down into what is beer in the chemicals that are in there, what are the parameters, the metrics, what are the, you know, the rulers and guidelines and measures of beer. Remember at the end of the day, people don’t drink by number, right? They drink what they think tastes good. And we can try to quantify all of those things as much as we want, but it’s the combination of that human element, and the, really, you know, technocratic scientific portion of it that makes beer what it is at the end of the day.
So when I’m at work, do I drink beer colloquially? Yeah, a lot. I have to, like, I’ll put an ounce of beer in my mouth, swish it around, taste it, spit it out. You know, what does it taste like? Does it taste right? Does it taste correct? You know, a lot of brewers will say, is it true to the brand I making? Right. Is it true to brand? If it is great, thumbs up. If it’s not, I’ve got a problem. I need to find solutions to it. I got to design experiments to figure out how can I fix it? Is it fixable? I have to make these calls. And then, you know, there are really important decisions that have to be, but you know, it doesn’t involve drinking beer. In a way, yeah, I would say more tasting beer than anything. But.
Yeah. I do drink a beer at work. I’m required to drink a beer at work. But you know, from a more, I guess you could say, you know, serious viewpoint, no, I don’t drink when I’m at work, right, in the same way that a person whose job it is to make wine doesn’t just drink wine at work. Right. They don’t drink at work. I wouldn’t drink at work. If you were a person that makes chocolate a chocolatier, right. Would you eat chocolate at work? No, probably not. Would you taste the chocolate, cause you have to? Yeah, you need. Or a chef. Do you eat at work as a chef? I mean, technically, yeah. Right. But you’re really more importantly tasting and dividing those less quantifiable parts of it. Right. It’s your job you have to, right?
Victoria:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. No one wants a brewer to be absolutely wasted, trying to make beer. There’s a lot of heavy machinery that goes on in there. And a lot of like really hot and cold stuff running around the brewery. You don’t want to like,
Victoria:
Ooh, yeah.
Dr. Tsai:
That’s an OSHA violation, buddy. That’s not good.
Victoria:
Yeah. So this isn’t a question on the list. This is something I just thought of. What is your kind of like day to day? Like. What do you do on a daily basis? Do you culture yeast? Do you do more like mixing things?
Dr. Tsai:
I would say from where I am now in terms of, you know, my role in a brewery now, I would say that I tend to be the person that all of those tasks tend to get delegated to. But I look at more, a lot of the data output. I mean, for those people who are in grad school now, or people who have, you know, academic careers, I would be akin to like a PI at this point. Am I in the lab? Yes. Am I designing experiments? In some cases, yeah. Am I actually physically executing the experiment on my own now? Not really. Not so much, but I do review a lot of the data, I go over a lot of that. In the analogous, you know, activities in the beer world are all things that I engage in as well. But am I the person that’s responsible for cultivating yeast or propagating yeast? No. Am I necessarily the person that is responsible for, you know, doing chemical fingerprinting essentially, or, you know, looking at, divining metrics for different types of beer that we’re producing? You know, personally, no, but as far as the data that’s collected and then looking at the overall trends and then reconciling those things, we’re interpreting those things and being able to explain them to senior leadership, right? Sales, marketing, CEO. COO. Right. All those people who are not necessarily subject matter experts in all of those portions of the brewing process, that’s where my job comes in. But it requires me to be able to have that facility of language of here’s the scientific part of it. Here’s the operational part of it. What are those two things mean, and how can I translate that to people. So it’s a lot like being a PI.
Victoria:
(Joe -Why has there been such a huge growth in the industry?)
Cool. Nice.
All right. And speaking of the industry, Joe wants to know why has there been such a huge growth in the industry?
Dr. Tsai:
There are a lot of reasons, right? We can look at this from pre COVID and post COVID or during COVID, I guess we’re not really post COVID. when you look at it from an overarching standpoint, there are a lot of reasons why the craft beer industry has experienced a lot of growth, right? There’s a lot of, you know, any business, any industry is going to be a balance of risk and reward in that business sector. And certainly, COVID shown that there’s a very, very clear limit now.
But there was a lot of growth in the industry because there were a lot of people consuming beer, right. There are a lot of people who really like craft beer, and they’re willing to pay prices that could support their own small local taproom.
One of the things that we’ve seen now is that, especially when we look at the pandemic now where you can’t just go to your neighborhood taproom easily, right. Certainly, you know, we’re in Boulder, Denver, right, the Metro Denver corridor, I guess you could say, or the outlying area for the Denver Metro area, you know. We can’t go to taprooms. Most taprooms functionally are closed, right? You have to drink outside. And it’s the middle of winter. We’re recording this at the end of December. Right. Today’s high was like in the forties. How many people are going to say, even though it was sunny today, how many people are going to say, yeah, great, can’t wait to throw on some flip flops and sit outside and just at the end of December and enjoy a brewski. It’ll be cold, to be sure, potentially colder than what you would want for an English ale like we discussed before, But, right, this might be a situation where we’re seeing the limit to that huge growth now. Right? Certainly if you look at a lot of the numbers now, COVID is really definitely the pandemic has definitely caused many, many breweries to shutter and we’re seeing now we will be seeing a pretty big contraction.
So yeah, there’s been a lot of growth in the industry because people really love craft beer and they should. Craft beer is exciting, it’s dynamic, it’s a lot of fun, tastes great, less filling. And so there’s just, there’s a lot of, you know, excitement, and now we’re seeing where the limit unfortunately have that excitement happens to be. And that’s now the risk, right? We’re at a point where the risk outweighs the reward. So, yeah.
Some breweries are doing really well though during COVID right. There are some breweries, larger breweries, but dominantly, because people want to drink at home. And, if the larger brewery can package up that beer in cans or bottles, then, and they can distribute it and they can sell it to people, then that’s the beer that’s going to be available. So those breweries will do well. The smaller stuff that that’s more closer to the English, you know, UK public house or pub model, right, where you go to your neighborhood bar, you go to the neighborhood taproom, it serves maybe however many square blocks, right? Small. And, that population that devoted consumer base can support that. You know, we’re finding now in the pandemic, it’s just not possible anymore, which is too bad, because you know, one of the nice things that I can say, I’m not going to say, I could say, but definitely can say about the craft industry is that we welcome all people into it. And it’s that constant influx of, you know, fresh perspectives, fresh eyes looking at the same problem that gives us, you know, that type of incredible, nearly unlimited creativity in the stuff that we do.
Victoria:
Yeah. That’s always great to have, always good.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah.
Victoria:
(Joe – What is the next big trend in beer?)
Good to hear.
Speaking of that creativity, another question from Joe, what is, or what do you think will be the next big trend in beer?
Dr. Tsai:
That’s a good question. If I knew the answer to that, I probably would be a millionaire right now.
It’s hard to say. if we want to look at just general beer trends, typically what we see is that, you know, like a lot of different things, you know, flavors, as far as trends go, trends always mirror a specific flavor profile or a presentation of a specific style or combination of factors that create a style or define a style of beer. They tend to be fairly cyclical, right. And they can be short or they can be long in duration, but typically we’ll see certain styles ebb and flow. And it’s because of the conditions under which we operate as a market, as an industry, commercially.
So, IPA is still a big thing, right? Everybody loves IPA. And, the biggest trend of IPA lately for the last year or two, three years has been hazy IPA, but that really mirrors a trend for beers with explosive flavor, but not a lot of bitterness. Right. And this mirrors a shorter burst, I guess you could say of, the trend of sour beer or explosive flavor, bright freshness in there, a lot of like very creative flavor combinations. And our sour beer is still a thing. Yeah. Do they dominate taprooms like they used to? No. They don’t. But I would say, go so far as to say same thing for hazy IPAs, does everybody have a hazy IPA? Yes. Does everybody have five hazy IPA’s on tap anymore? No, probably just one or two. Right.
Nowadays, you know, you’re seeing a resurgence in lager beer. And that really is a reflection of, you know, the conditions that we’re in, in a pandemic. Do you want to sit at home and drink one really, really massive, like 10% ABV or really super heavy imperial stout or ultra rich, you know, milk stout, sweet stout when you’re at home? No, most people are quarantined, the board out of their gourds, they hate their existence and they’re just drinking beer. Right. And they don’t want to drink one beer. They’re probably sitting in their shower at 10 o’clock in the morning, drinking beer. They’re literally probably drinking a beer in the shower, shower beer, right. Is a shower beer like a barrel-aged imperial stout? No, it’s not. No one should be so rich as to be able to drink, you know, your old barrel-aged imperial status as a shower beer, right? Like colloquial shower beer is like we’re light, right? It’s a light lager. It’s something that’s easy to drink, low ABV, it doesn’t have to have explosive flavor, it’s just easy to drink. It’s refreshing. And it feels good. Right. And you feel like you can drink a million of them. So we’re seeing that, you know, becoming a lot more represented in craft beer now, you know, before you wouldn’t see very many craft breweries that have, you know, one lager let alone, you know, multiple lager styles. And we’re seeing that a lot more, more frequently now. And I think that has to do with again, you know, the market conditions that we’re living in now. You know, drinkability and drinking a lot of it is what’s now going to define your success as a brewery, because if you are able to get your product out to consumers, then, if you want to beat your competition, you’re going to need to sell a lot more beer. And do you want to, is it going to be easier to sell a lot more 10% heavy beer or is it going to be easier to sell lighter, less filling, right. but still flavorful 4% beer, right. There’s a very easy, right, equivalency to be made there.
Victoria:
Yeah. Yeah. Oh man, I can’t wait till we’re post COVID and I can go and have a glass of beer or, you know, not drinking out of a can at home, but like actually go and have it serve to me.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. There’ve been times at the brewery that I was working at prior to my new position where, you know, being in the brew house. Can you drink beer? Yeah. Can you drink really, really fresh beer right off a tank? Certainly. Is it amazing? Absolutely. But when there’s a window there and someone’s walking around outside, and you’re sitting there with, you know, this incredibly fresh glass of beer and you’re drinking it and you get the side eye and you look out there and you see that person staring at you very disapprovingly. They don’t get to do that. You feel pretty, you do tend to feel pretty bad, until like the sixth time, then you just give them like, raise the glass, cheers, and then like, just drink your beer. Right. Should had my job, buddy.
Victoria:
(Shaye – Do all breweries have beer scientists?)
Well, that’s a good transition. Speaking of your job, Shaye wants to know, do all breweries have beer scientists.
Dr. Tsai:
Not all. Many do. Right. Many do. I would go so far as to say that if we want to look at it from a degree holding standpoint, many do. Okay. Especially once you get to a big enough size, a brewery has to have an actual scientist. That being said, I would go so far as to say, and I’m happy to say collectively as a generalization, every brewery has a beer scientist, whether they’re a degree holder or not, right. The knowledge that I have isn’t necessarily, you know, better or worse than anyone who doesn’t have an advanced degree like I do, the difference is that what I know, right, in terms of the spectrum of things that I know, is not as niche as the person who doesn’t have my degree. Any brewer can be a beer scientist, they may simply not have the breadth of knowledge, that the technical jargon, or the depth of review material or background science that I just happen to possess. That’s all. Anyone could be a beer scientist.
Victoria:
(Mark – Do you also brew your own beer?)
All right. And then this is our very last question. Kind of a fun question from Mark. Do you also brew your own beer?
Dr. Tsai:
Oh yeah. God. Yeah. Of course. Of course. I brew my own beer. You don’t ask a chef. Do you still cook food? Of course. Yeah. I like beer just as much as anyone else. And if I can’t find what I want, then I know how to make it, so I’m going to make it, right.
Victoria:
That’s awesome.
Dr. Tsai:
If you can’t find the right chocolate chip cookie that suits the bill for you, right, and you know how to make chocolate chip cookies, and you know what has to be done to make the chocolate chip cookie that you like, you want to make sure you get the chocolate chip cookie you like all the time, you’re going to start making it on your own. The same thing for me.
And it doesn’t mean that I’m making the same beer every single time. Certainly, as a scientist, I automatically have that kind of curiosity, right. That everybody has. I’m not special. Everybody has the same level of curiosity that I do. I just have, I guess, in some ways the idiocy to just blindly go satisfy that curiosity, more so than most, right. So I’m obviously willing to do, and that means I have to brew beer. Is a good beer? Not necessarily. It’s going to be great beer? Maybe. Is even going to be consistent fantastic beer? No, not necessarily. Sometimes I’ll purposely try some stuff that might be kind of janky because maybe I don’t know any better, and I’m going to do it because I want to know, I’ve been told this is a janky way of doing it, but can I get away with it? And if I can, great. I I’ve learned something new; if I can’t get away with it, well, yeah, the hypothesis was, this is a bad way of doing it, let’s test the hypothesis by trying to disprove it. Right. And no, it’s a janky way of doing it. That was bad.
Victoria:
Yeah. It’s a part of science, part of life.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. There we go. Yeah.
Victoria:
Yeah. I know a couple of our listeners did just get some cool home brew kits for the holidays. So do you have any tips or advice for them.
Dr. Tsai:
Start simple. Right. Always start simple. I know that a lot of people that get homebrew kits want to do something crazy. I wanna make a big imperial style. You know, I want to make the, you know, a clone of a specific IPA. And then the answer is you can, and that’s something that you can do early on. But just like baking bread or making cookies at home or baking a cake. There’s no shame in going and buying the ready mix and just seeing, like, what are the mechanical aspects of doing this thing? What’s the order of operation, right. If you want to learn to drive a car, do you just go out and rent a Bugatti Veyron or, you know, a McLaren P1 and jump in there and go straight to a five-speed manual auto downtown. No, right. You could. I’m sure people want to. That’d be great. I would love to go to King Soopers in my McLaren P1. That’d be fantastic. But at the end of the day, you know, if you’re trying to learn how to drive, then just grab that ratty old Honda Civic and you know, two decades old Honda Civic, and then you can beat it up and that’s fine. And is it going to get you where you need to go? Yeah. Are you going to learn some lessons? Yeah. Is it serviceable? Perfectly fine. Is it a McLaren P1? No. But at the same time, did you need it? No. Right.
So when you get your home brew kit, start simple. It doesn’t have to be, you’re not trying to make the world’s greatest beer right off the bat. And if you could make the world’s greatest beer right off the bat, then find your local brewer. And tell them you made the world’s greatest beer, and then see if they’ll give you a job.
Victoria:
Great advice. Awesome. That’s all of our questions, but do you have any questions of your own for the listeners?
Dr. Tsai:
Not really. I would just say really, just to, as far as advice goes, no, it might be unorthodox, right. For some of the listeners there to say, Oh, well you can be a scientist of beer. Right? Most people, when they think of a scientist, they think of things like NASA or, you know, biology, bioengineering, archeology, right. Well, you know, Indiana Jones is an archeologist. Doesn’t mean he’s not a scientist, right? It belongs in a museum. That’s what a scientist would say. Right? You can be a scientist for anything, right. You just have to entertain your curiosity to employ the critical thinking skills that we always classically associate with science. It doesn’t mean that it has to sound sciencey. Beer doesn’t sound sciencey, but there’s an incredible, incredible uncharted territory scientifically in beer, both in biology, the chemistry involved with it, a whole host of things, right?
So you can be a scientist for anything. What really matters most for anyone that’s listening to your podcast is be curious, and be willing to entertain that curiosity. Be curious, stay curious, and always keep pursuing those things that you’re curious about. That’s what makes you a scientist?
Victoria:
That’s wonderful advice. That’s exactly the goal of this podcast is to help listeners learn that.
Dr. Tsai:
Yeah. I think that’s really important, right?
Victoria:
Yeah.
Dr. Tsai:
That’s really, really important.
Victoria:
Yeah, I think so, too. So thank you.
Dr. Tsai:
You’re welcome.
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