Broadhead Brewing pairs with Carleton University for beer experiment
A new Carleton University research facility has paired up with Ottawa’s Broadhead Brewing for a six-month experiment looking at the shelf life and proper storage temperature of beer.
The project is meant to analyze how the chemistry of beer changes over time depending on its temperature and the size of its container, said Jeff Smith, the head of the new Carleton Mass Spectrometry Centre.
The centre is home to seven mass spectrometers — worth about $1 million each — which allow researchers to create a “molecular fingerprint” of the beer, Smith said.
“If the beer tastes off we can actually tell the molecules that are responsible for the beer not being quite right,” said Smith, who spoke with Alan Neal on CBC Radio’s All In A Day.
“Our instrument is much more sensitive than the human palette in the sense that we can start to seeing the [molecular] signature going a certain way that we know will lead to a bad taste well before you’d be able to taste it.”
Listen to the full interview here.
Josh Larocque, co-founder of Broadhead, described the expensive machines on All In A Day.
“The best way, and maybe the funniest way, I’ve heard them referred to is a microwave connected to a stove. It looks almost like it’s a bunch of appliances,” Larocque said.
Smith said the project is an opportunity for academia to partner with a small business that might not otherwise be able to afford the machines.
“We can use these instruments for a variety of things. Most of my research is more medically based. But one of the things we’ve been doing lately is trying to strive to make new partnerships with the local community to help businesses and industry improve their processes,” Smith said.
The project is funded by a $25,000 Engage Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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