Unravelling formation and/or release of beer staling aldehydes.

From an economic point of view, the flavour quality beer is of primary importance as it largely determines consumers acceptance or rejection. Beer flavour is however not stable on storage, which constitutes a serious quality problem, especially for export oriented breweries. Aldehydes are considered key factors in beer ageing. However, despite many years of research, the mechanisms underlying generation of staling aldehydes in ageing beer are still unknown. Aldehydes might be formed de novo (e.g. from Strecker degradation of amino acids) or they might be released from preformed adducts (e.g. imines) present in beer. The aim of this proposal is to study beer flavour instability in a fundamental way in order to understand the formation of free and bound-state aldehydes (imines, bisulfite adducts, thiazolidine compounds) and to unravel the role of these different types of adducts as potential precursors of key principles of beer ageing, i.e. staling aldehydes.

Keywords:bierverouderingsaldehyden.

Disciplines:Food sciences and (bio)technology