According to popular opinion, wheat beer should smell more like bananas or cloves. I just poured a beer, and the latter should work: Maisel’s Weisse Original. Can you confirm the smell of cloves?
Thomas A. Virges: (Smell in his cup) It doesn’t smell like carnations. I have cloves. Do you find cloves in beer?
I want to say that at most I can only guess one-tenth or one-twentieth of the smell in your spice jar.
I have another sample-its aroma provides the main aroma of cloves: eugenol. smell it.
It smells different again, farther away from the taste of wheat beer. It smells quite leathery and woody.
I also brought something else: smoked ham. Smell it and think about the typical meaty taste. Then we got closer to the problem.
There is a lot of closeness there.
It must now be admitted that in the case of eugenol or cloves, the components that make up the main smell of cooked ham smoke are also present in a very weak form-but by no means dominant. By the way, the main aroma of smoked ham is 4-vinyl-2-methoxyphenol. This may actually happen during the brewing process. On the other hand, the search for eugenol was futile, purely because of the enzymatic activity involved in the brewing process. Only by putting it in a wooden barrel, in a burning wooden barrel, it will enter the beer. I admit that the shortage of beer in the spicy aroma and phenylpropane-like substances is a kind of sophistry. You have to look at the molecule. However, if you look at this, the discovery is clear, as you can see on this picture.
Except for those matured in wooden barrels, no beer will produce this spicy aroma. On the other hand, for the combination of food and beer and food, this aroma gap in beer creates interesting possibilities. For example, you can use eugenol and other flavors in this course to fill in the gaps.
How did you find Bill Luc? Did you notice when handling wheat beer: It doesn’t smell like cloves. Or does it start from the brewing process and find the gap theoretically?
I discussed taste in depth in my book, and found in many beer experiments: Eugenol is simply not recognized here. Then I checked the research literature and saw it confirmed that eugenol cannot be produced during yeast fermentation.
But can you understand the banana aroma of wheat beer?
Yes, the top fermenting yeast in wheat prefers to produce fruit esters, which mainly has a typical banana aroma. From a yeast point of view, this is also logical. Yeast is wild, and brewer’s yeast is just a special species. Yeast is a single-celled organism that can fly around, but it’s not that good. Many times, they sit on top of the fruit. In the wild, the smell produced by the yeast when the fruit is fermented will produce a strong fruit taste, which is wise. Because these will attract fruit flies and other insects. They stay on the fruit, taste the smell produced or enhanced by the yeast, and then eat or suck on something. And at the moment they fly away, there are many yeasts on each leg, and they are taken to a new substrate, a new breeding ground. This is how yeast reproduces well.
