Science 

We've seen tremendous growth in the last couple of years in really low and no alcohol content beer. Thirty years ago, every state had their dominant brewery. Essentially, regardless of what the beer was marketed as, it was a lager. So we were drinking essentially lagers and nothing else. And with this evolution of the craft industry, we're getting great variety in the beers that we're now consuming. Along with the diversity we're seeing in styles of beer we're seeing diversity and catering to certain sectors of the market. We have the technology and the knowledge to make those beers better now than what we did when they first came on the market. And I also think that maybe the fact that the craft breweries have got on board with it might help give it some acceptance too. We run a Graduate Certificate in Brewing and most of our students are usually experienced home brewers, but not always. A lot of them have a desire to change current careers to move into the brewing career. So this is a great way for them to learn the science behind brewing and make them really well placed to move into a career in brewing. The sensory project began three years ago when we were doing one of our workshops. We had brewers on site and part of their training is to do a triangle test that would put an alcoholic beer versus a non-alcoholic counterpart next to it. All they have to do is pick the odd one out. And on this particular day, maybe 5 out of 6 participants could not pick the odd one out. And we thought that was really quite curious. Were the breweries making alcohol-free beers that good that they're indistinguishable? So we have started up a research project which has two components to it. The first component is asking people whether they think they could cut an alcohol-free beer from its alcoholic counterpart. We interviewed 200 people and not just looking at alcohol content, also looking at reduced-carb beers, look at gluten-free beers. The second part of that project is getting people onto campus and actually getting them to repeat the triangle test. And so we were interested to see: has the quality of these products improved? Are they really good facsimiles of their full-strength counterparts? And that's sort of what spurred this project on in the first instance. The link for the survey is still open. So we're still taking response on that. So if someone wants to contribute in their thoughts on beer, we would be very appreciative. And we will be running these workshops for people to come on board and try some beers and partake in these triangle tests in the next few months. Low-alcohol beers, they're more prone to bacterial contamination. So that means there's an additional risk. So we were recently awarded $30,000 by the American Society for Brewing Chemists, and that is to look at the food safety of these low alcohol beers to detect if there's any pathogens or dangerous foodborne organisms in their beer. So that's an exciting piece of research that we've been conducting here at the university as well. You can make good beer without the science, but you can't make good beer all the time without science. To some degree, you're getting a little bit lucky. And if a problem arises, if you know the science, you can troubleshoot your problems and you can prevent them from happening. The other thing that the science enables you to do is to really maximise your outputs, brew more efficiently in both time and energy and resources and the like. So there's a lot of reasons to appreciate the science of brewing.