FrankenHopped/She Blinded Me With Science – An All GMO Beer
Human’s made the first GMO back in 1973. The first commercial GMO hit the market was in 1992, and since then GMOs have become central to agriculture, medicine, biomedical research, and even laundry detergent.
I love genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Their positive impact on my families farms, on medicine and medical research, and in other aspects of my life, is astounding. I teach this technology to undergraduate students, and have even worked on it with some biotechnology companies. I’ve always been saddened that brewing has largely been excluded from these advances – at this time, there are no GMO’d barleys or hops on the market.
But we’re finally starting to see some GMO yeast, and they have some great potential. The GMO yeast we see on the market today come in two general flavours – transgenics and gene edited yeast:
Transgenic: This is your classical GMO, where a gene is taken from one species and inserted into another, giving the latter a new characteristic.
Gene Edited: This uses targeted mutation to, in most cases, inactivate an undesired gene.
Brewers now have access to both transgenic and edited yeasts. Among the edited yeasts are low-ester lager yeasts that have had some of their esterase genes inactivated, while on the transgenic side we have hyper-Biotransformating yeasts and yeasts that make lactic acid.
In this recipe, I harness two transgenic yeasts to make a hop-forward quick-sour IPA. Biotransformation is driven by Omega Yeasts Cosmic Punch, which has been modified to produce a lot more of the IRC7 gene, which in turn, drives the release of thiols. The second yeast I used was my old friend Sourvisiae from Fermentas. This yeast has been transformed with the lactate dehydrogenase yeast from the soil fungus Rhizopus oryzae, allowing it to make lactic acid.
The Usual GMO Warning
Unfortunately, a number of “environmental” NGOs and organic food producers have spent a lot of money trying to convince you that GMO’s are dangerous.
In reality, GMOs are some of the most heavily scrutinized products in the history of human kind, and have been consumed by humans and animals for over three decades. There are literally thousands of safety (and environmental) studies on GMO’s showing them to be safe.
I will not tolerate any fearmongering about GMOs in the comments. This is not what this post is about. If you want to debate GMO safety, do so elsewhere. Comments violating this policy will be deleted; repeat offenders will be blocked from commenting. My blog, my rules.
Considerations
When designing this beer, I was trying to make a “hopped Berlinerwiess”, or “sour IPA” style beer appropriate for this ungodly hot & humid summer we’re having. So it needed to be crushable, low-alcohol, and with a bright and crisp finish. I also needed it yesterday – it’s already too damned hot, and all I got on tap are a dark IPA, a hisbisus-sour from my solera, and a 10% ABV traditional mead. Not exactly summer fare!
This recipe is a pretty classic “sour IPA” or “hopped Berlinerwiss”. 3.4% ABV, mixture of barley and wheat malts, and mashed low to create as fermentable a wort as possible. For the hops I went with the classical mix of Mosaic and Simcoe. In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best use of Cosmic Punch’s biotransformation capabilities, but as you’ll see in the tasting notes, I have no regrets.
The other thing I had to balance out was Sourvisiae. As my previous experiments found, this yeast is extremely aggressive and will produce an overly acidic beer if used in too large a proportion of the total yeast. I had not brewed with Cosmic Punch previously, but given its English yeast background, I knew finding a good balance may be hard. The flip-side is that the low ABV of this beer means that there is little room for error – over activity of one yeast could easily ferment this beer dry while the other yeast was still in lag phase. Ultimately, I decided on the following:
- 4 days before brewday I prepared a 700 mL starter of sourvisiae, adding 0.5 g/L of baking soda (Sodium bicarbonate) to counter the impact of acidity on this yeast.
- 2 days before brewday I transferred the sourvisiae to the fridge and prepared a 500 mL starter of Cosmic punch.
Because the sourvisiae was stored in the fridge for a few days, I also pitched the sourvisiae 2 hours before the Cosmis punch. My hope was this would give the sourvisiae a chance to get through lag phase before pitching the highly active starter of Cosmic punch.
Recipe
| Ingredient | Amount | %/IBU |
|---|---|---|
| Canadian 2-Row Malt | 1.5 kg | 50% |
| Munich Malt | 1 kg | 33% |
| Red Wheat Malt | 0.5 kg | 17% |
| Mosaic, 12% alpha acids, whirlpool (30 min @ 75C, 10 min free-fall) | 42 g | 6.3 IBU |
| Simcoe, 13% alpha acids, whirlpool (30 min @ 75C, 10 min free-fall) | 42 g | 6.8 IBU |
| Mosaic, 12% alpha acids, 3 day dryhop | 42 g | — |
| Simcoe, 13% alpha acids, 3 day dryhop | 42 g | — |
| Cosmic Punch | 500 mL | |
| Sourvisiae | 700 mL |
Mash and sparge water was adjusted to 200:50 sulfate:chloride. Mashed at 64C for 75 minutes, followed by a 76C/10 minute mash-out. After sparging, the beer was brought to a boil, then immediately chilled to whirlpool temperature (75C) and the whirlpool hops added. I got distracted, so the end of the whirlpool was extended by an extra 10 minutes, with the temperature free-falling in that time.
I then transferred to a fermenter, pitched the sourvisiae, and 2 hours later pitched the Cosmic Punch. After 4 days of fermentation I added the dry hops, and packaged into a keg on day 7.
Tasting Notes
Appearance: Pale in colour and with a haze typical of a hazy IPA. Pours with a nice white head that persists until the end of the pint.
Aroma: Intense tropical fruit note, mostly mango, along with an intense citrus. It is also notable what is missing – often I get a “bacterial” character in quick sours. It’s the smell of lactobacillus – slightly vegetal, but hard to describe. And it is completely absent from this beer.
Flavour: This is a fruit salad. Citrus, mango, even a hint of papaya. The sourness is “tart”, making this nicely refreshing instead of an acid bomb. Personally, I’d prefer this to be slightly more sour, but it’s well within the range I was shooting for. The finish is dry and crisp, with the crispness accentuated by the sourness of the beer. The ~12 IBUs of bitterness contributes to that dryness, but isn’t so strong as to clash with the beer’s sourness. Aftertaste is a lingering fruit.
Mouthfeel: Refreshing, dry, and crisp, with a slight acid tingle.
Overall: This beer is perfect for summer. Great flavour, easy drinking, and refreshing. Given how quick it was to brew, it’s also a good beer if you’re in a rush. I will be rebrewing this in the future, but I plan on using more classical hops (Cascade and Centennial) like I did when I tested Escarpment Lab’s Hydra & Thiol Libre yeasts. Those yeasts converted these ‘C’ hops into a tropical wonderland, and I’ curious to see if Cosmic Punch can do the same.
Isn’t Golden Promise GMO, or at least GMO adjacent? It was produced by irradiating barley with gamma rays in order to mutate it.
Golden Promise (along with about a third of all crops, including many vegetables, and even hops) is a product of mutagenic breeding – when breeders use radiation of chemical mutagens to introduce tens of thousands of random mutations into a crop, in the hopes of generating a desired trait. But, despite generating literally thousands of mutations – most of which will never be identified nor have their effects known – mutagenic breeding is not considered a GMO. No extra regulations to bring them to market, they can be grown as “organic” produce, despite being the product of completely uncontrolled human-generated mutagenesis. But, you carefully edit a single basepair with CRISPR, or introduce a well characterized gene completely under your control, and BAM, you got a GMO. Extra regulations, extra scrutiny – despite being much more predictable and controlled.
And its not just mutagenesis that gets a pass:
Anyways, that’s the rant…