Cancer Fighting Beer

This is all about resveratrol, the chemical responsible for red wine’s healthful reputation. The problem is that it takes about half a bottle of wine daily to realize any benefit. So students and researches at Rice University in Houston are looking for ways to get resveratrol into beer at higher concentrations.

How? Well, this is the particularly intriguing part of the whole thing to me. They have been genetically modifying brewer’s yeast so that it produces resveratrol. In wine the stuff normally comes from the grape but in the case of this theoretical beer it will come from the fermentation process itself.

The chemical itself is flavorless but after tinkering with the genetics of brewers yeast the scientists report that their beer doesn’t taste very good. So they’ve been working with the Saint Arnold Brewing Co. in Texas to fix that little detail.