With a fresh fizz and hoppy scent, a cold beer is a drink that touches all of our senses. But as our climate changes, so too might the flavour profile of one of the world’s most popular drinks.
With its satisfying, tantalising flavour, few drinks evoke as familiar a feeling as a freshly poured beer. “It’s not only bitter, it’s not only sweet, it almost invites you to a next sip, and that’s a very difficult quality to describe,” says Mirek Trnka, a researcher at the Global Change Research Institute Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
The flavour of beer is created by a complex symphony of chemical compounds from three ingredients; hops, yeast and malted barley. But now climate change is threatening the production of two of those – barley and hops. Trnka and his colleagues say that the traditional crops that brewers rely on to create beer – called noble hops – will become “more difficult to grow”.