Brewing part 2: Brewing meets Life sciences. Introducing the BEER BIOME.
I want to talk about a concept I've been mulling over for a bit. First, I should explain what a biome is.
I learned the term biome from video games I played when I was younger. Sim-Earth to be specific.
A Biome is essentially an sub-section of an Environment. Take a jungle for example they have particular characteristics (heavily forested, very moist, very little sunlight reaches the forest floor). You can divide up the segments as small as you like. Even down to something so small that you can call it a micro-biome. If fact, cutting edge nutrition and healthcare has taken notice of micro-biomes within our own bodies. Scores of bacteria that live in the guts of every human being. Biomes are everywhere and serve a vast variety of purposes, including keeping us healthy by processing the food we eat and managing our metabolism.
My idea is to create an artificial sub-section of our environment specifically to make beer or other alcoholic products. To be specific a micro-biome, a BEER BIOME. I think as far as what goes into it conceptually it's simple. Start with water and sunlight. Add a variety of cyanobacteria that produce and excrete more sugar(the sugar is key) than they need to survive, then provide yeast to turn those sugars into alcohol. At a high level that's it. You input water and light, you get water and alcohol. Granted that's not quite beer but I assume you could include various flavor accents to achieve a quality brew(see my part 1 about culinary brewing for the concept). The timing of removing and replacing the water should in part determine the alcohol content. The rest would be up to the the hardiness of the bacteria. I'm sure you could isolate them to some extent to help prevent them from making their environments too toxic for them to continue living.
It's not as foolproof and easy as it appears though. My research on cyanobacteria indicated that the process chloroplasts(the organelle inside a cell that enables photosynthesis) use to create sugars also create substances that are toxic to humans. So steps would need to be taken to filter and sequester these toxins to produce a consumable product. Anyway I would love to see brewing enthusiasts with more expertise in microbiology than I have give this some study. I think there's potential.
Sources for the uninitiated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
How yeast does it's thing:
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect14.htm
I learned the term biome from video games I played when I was younger. Sim-Earth to be specific.
A Biome is essentially an sub-section of an Environment. Take a jungle for example they have particular characteristics (heavily forested, very moist, very little sunlight reaches the forest floor). You can divide up the segments as small as you like. Even down to something so small that you can call it a micro-biome. If fact, cutting edge nutrition and healthcare has taken notice of micro-biomes within our own bodies. Scores of bacteria that live in the guts of every human being. Biomes are everywhere and serve a vast variety of purposes, including keeping us healthy by processing the food we eat and managing our metabolism.
My idea is to create an artificial sub-section of our environment specifically to make beer or other alcoholic products. To be specific a micro-biome, a BEER BIOME. I think as far as what goes into it conceptually it's simple. Start with water and sunlight. Add a variety of cyanobacteria that produce and excrete more sugar(the sugar is key) than they need to survive, then provide yeast to turn those sugars into alcohol. At a high level that's it. You input water and light, you get water and alcohol. Granted that's not quite beer but I assume you could include various flavor accents to achieve a quality brew(see my part 1 about culinary brewing for the concept). The timing of removing and replacing the water should in part determine the alcohol content. The rest would be up to the the hardiness of the bacteria. I'm sure you could isolate them to some extent to help prevent them from making their environments too toxic for them to continue living.
It's not as foolproof and easy as it appears though. My research on cyanobacteria indicated that the process chloroplasts(the organelle inside a cell that enables photosynthesis) use to create sugars also create substances that are toxic to humans. So steps would need to be taken to filter and sequester these toxins to produce a consumable product. Anyway I would love to see brewing enthusiasts with more expertise in microbiology than I have give this some study. I think there's potential.
Sources for the uninitiated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
How yeast does it's thing:
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect14.htm
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