....how does the perfect pairing of freshly cooked lobster with a cool beer sound, especially as we head into the warmer summer months?By Karen Wilson, PhD
Making sure the beer is a pilsner, IPA or Belgian witbier of course, to balance the citrus notes and stand up to the meaty texture of the lobster.
Sounds exquisite, doesn’t it? Well, some recent research news may change your perception of such delicacies, and make you think more deeply about the wonder of nature.
A multinational team of scientists has recently attempted to explain the colour change mechanism from dark blue to orange when a lobster is cooked. The dark blue colour arises from an astaxanthin-crustacyanin protein complex.
Crustacyanin is not heat-stable, so denatures when cooked and releases unbound astaxanthin (an orange colour). Spectroscopic studies, paired with quantum chemical calculations used to reproduce the experimental observations, determined that the crustacyanin protein-bound astaxanthin exists in its negatively charged enolate ion state, blue in colour.
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| Image: m o |
And just when you were thinking I’d forgotten about that beer, spare a thought for the amount of work Finnish and German researchers have put into analysing samples of a 170-year old beer recovered from a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea, in a bid to uncover its composition and how it was made. Physicochemical characteristics and flavour compound profiles were analysed using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC-MS). It was noted that extensive degradation had taken place, as well as the beer being diluted with seawater.
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| Image: Quinn Dombrowski |
The research was enough to pass to Stallhagen brewery in Finland, to recreate the beer (albeit without the degradation qualities!), and ‘1843 beer’ can now found on the supermarket shelves of Finland.
Visit the R&D news site HERE.
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