Thursday, April 5, 2007

Hop aroma research

I decided to make a quick post while grading General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry exams. It is times like this that I really regret not giving multiple choice exams.

The Gen Chem exam is on acid-bases, Ka and solubility product.
Organic is on electrophilic aromatic substitution and intro to reactions with carbonyl carbons. Good stuff.

Anyways, the real purpose of this post....

I'm reading an article titled Hop Aroma in American Beer. J. Agric. Food Chem. 1980, 28, 774-777 (pdf of first page).

OK, well, I'm not actually reading it, but I will. I couldn't get past the first line in the experimental section:

Eight liters of each beer was vacuum distilled (0.02 torr) at 20°C into a trap cooled in liquid nitrogen.


Eight liters of beer?!?!?!?! nay, of EACH beer.

This is why I can't do research of this type. I would have a very hard time dumping 8 liters of beer into anything other than my mouth (not in one sitting of course).

Maybe bad beer, but the analysis of bad beer would be pointless.

OK... back to the correcting.

2 comments:

MJenks said...

SNAR has been a point of discussion quite often touched upon in the office/lab of late. Funny things happen when you pop nitrogens in the ring(s).

Further, on the cheap beer front...how much actual "hops" do those cheap beers have? Not much, I'd say. But then, given the landscape of brewing in the U.S. in the late 70s, I'm guessing they were using Schlitz as their standard and not something that we'd expect today, like an IPA or ESB or anything from Stone.

Anonymous said...

Hey Chem Geek, you seem to be expert in everything. Recently, I had access to free red wine and some white wine...( I do not know what exactly they were)....but I got drunk fully (for the first time)...though I used to drink beer before. I had hung up for few days, after which I started loosing the skin on my fingers. Do you if it has anything to do with what I drank?