Scientists at the University of Seville have developed a way to determine a beer's country of origin. They check things like the chemical components of things like the water and the hops that went into making the beer. Because these sorts of things vary from region to region, the test can determine with 99% accuracy what country a beer came from.
Okay, so it's not really DNA testing but it's sort of the same thing.
I hear you brewers and homebrewers starting to mumble out there. Sometimes, brewers will artificially alter the chemical makeup of their brewing water to more accurately mimic that used by the original brewers of the style. The scientists admit that this can sometimes mess with their results but things like the chemical compounds in the hops will still tell the full story. (That's assuming the hops weren't imported, I suppose.)
So, why does anyone really care about this? Besides just knowing for sure where a particular beer comes from, there are legal issues of country of origin. Europe, for example, enforces country and region of labeling on a lot of the products produced there. If one wanted to test a beer that claimed to be from, say, Bavaria now there's a test to do that.
Comments