A Metabolomic Approach to Beer Characterization

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. H-1-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.

Automated summary

With the increasing interest of consumers in beer consumption, the field of beeromics is continuously growing, requiring quick and exhaustive analytical methods. This study proposed a combination of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and chemometrics to characterize beer, demonstrating that the resolved information is comparable with the full spectrum information but with improved interpretability.