A Metabolomic Approach to Beer Characterization

Molecules. 2021 Mar 8;26(5):1472. doi: 10.3390/molecules26051472.

Abstract

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. 1H-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.

Keywords: NMR; beer; chemometrics; features extraction; foodomics.

MeSH terms

  • Beer / analysis*
  • Beer / microbiology*
  • Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy / methods
  • Metabolomics / methods*