Flavour enhancement of beer and related beverages by increasing flavour precursors in raw materials by enzymes

In the past two decades, the brewing industry has witnessed the growing consumer demands for new beer types. Meanwhile,responsible drinking and health concern fuel the non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beer market. Towards this end, a plethora ofliterature has been dedicated to fermentation by non-conventional yeast strains, producing fruity flavours in beer and relatedbeverages [1]. In parallel with this, it is feasible to achieve flavour improvement by using raw material to its fullness. Thisapproach focuses on releasing more flavour precursor amino acids – leucine, isoleucine, valine, and phenylalanine – byenzymes during the beer manufacturing process. These branched-chain and aromatic amino acids participate in the Ehrlichpathway in yeast cells during fermentation, which accounts for the characteristic higher alcohols and their ester derivatives inbeer [2]. Lab scale lager beer production was performed to demonstrate this method. GC-MS with stir bar sorptive extraction(Twisters) was applied to characterise the resulting products.