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Scientists in Belgium that celebrated bastion of ancient beer culture are harnessing genetic breakthroughs and machine learning to reimagine how great booze gets built. Here's how their revelations in the

lab could transform the global beer industry. The secretive beer lab inside the headquarters of the world's biggest brewing company doesn't often allow visitors, but today ab InBev has something it would like to show off, so David de Schutter, the head of ab Imbev's Global Innovationation and Technology Center, the official name of the beer Lab, is showing me around. The squat black building on the outskirts of Luvan, Belgium, about a half hour east of Brussels, Belgium, is one

of beer's ancestral Homelands. Across the street from the lab is the brewery that makes Stella Artois. Luvan Is crossed by canals originally built by brewers to move their product. This is a beer company in a beer town in a beer country. So the office building has a dedicated tasting room with a heggerator. When we get there to Shooter's colleagues have arrayed some snacks along with twelve different kinds of beer for me to try. That's enough beer

to give Homer Simpson pause. Taste testing alcohol typically demands small SIPs, copious notes, and a lot of hepatic fortitude, but not today, because most of those beers are alcohol free. This might come as a surprise after all. In addition to Stella, a b Imbev owns Budweiser, Corona Modello, Globe, and several other well known brands. It is to beer what Google is to the Internet, or Exon Mobil is to oil, and beer is generally understood to be alcoholic.

Yet here I am taking a skeptical sip of michelob Ultra Zero and Corona Sero, a b Imbev's state of the art flagship non alcoholic beers. As a technical matter, it's not hard to get the alcohol out of beer, but it's hard to make the result taste good. You tend to get something that is, to paraphrase the author

Douglas Adams, almost but not quite entirely unlike beer. Ab Imbev introduced micalob ultra zero in early twenty twenty five as the worldwide market for na beer's was quickly ramping up, and these were the best tasting examples its science could deliver. They were fine. The sugar is proud of these beers, but he must know they're merely fine. Then he offers me a bottle of the new state of the art.

This is ab Imbev's latest biotechnological invention, non alcoholic negra medello, made with something dubbed smart yeast, a new strain of the essential microorganism that makes all beer possible. Medello is typically bottled at five point four percent alcohol. Smart East Medello, as I came to call it, clocks in at zero point four percent at the moment. Smart Yeast medello is available only in Mexico. It's basically still in beta. Medello is my usual order with Mexican food, so I'm familiar

enough to detect deviation from speck. In beer terms, negro medello is a Munich type dunkle, mahogany colored and malty. I take a whiff. It has the same roasted, hoppy aroma of medello. Now a sip, it has a good balance of sweeter, malt and bitterness. The mouth feel seems a little thin, maybe slightly too astringent. It wasn't quite medello, but it was eminently drinkable. The shooter takes a sip too, then looks at me. We're super excited about this, he says.

In twenty twenty four, ab Imbev made sixty billion dollars and produced fifteen billion gallons of beer. But today, for the first time, after thousands of years of uninterrupted success, the nearly trillion dollar beer industry is in decline. In beer drinking epicenters like Belgium and Australia, consumption has gone down by fifty percent in the past half century. Beer consumption in the United States is down twenty five percent

since nineteen eighty. In twenty twenty three, Americans bought less beer than in any other country than in any other year this century. Younger people in particular are drinking less, and no one's quite sure why it's happening in places where marijuana is legal and where it's illegal, so that's not the culprit. There's certainly more health conscious and more skeptical of even moderate amounts of alcohol. A recent report from Rebaubank hinted that gen zers spend less on booze

because they have less money overall. But then why are canned cocktails surging? Do gen zers really prefer a tall can of salted caramel banana pina colada. What's abundantly clear is that beer is taking the hit category wide, from ultra bitter West Coast IPAs to English pub style ales. With just one glaring exception, non alcoholic beer. Sales of NA beer is defined as under zero point five percent alcohol by volume, were up twenty nine percent in twenty

twenty four in the US. The marketing team at ab Imbev saw this coming for years. It has seen strong sales of so called light beers, lower in calories and with less alcohol than a standard brew. And from a

business perspective, non alcoholic beer is all upside. It's a premium, high priced product, says Dave Infant, author of the booze industry newsletter Fingers And in the US, the companies don't pay excise taxes on beer with no alcohol, so the margins relative are really attractive, and a beer could be the wind that the industry sorely needs now. So ab Imbev's scientists went back to the lab, hunting for a new way to make beer without alcohol that tasted as

good as beer with it. They found a lot more, something that might explain not just how to make a new beer, but why people like it in the first place. If the science of beer enjoying has a unified field theory, this was the god particle. The key was the yeast. Yeast ferments, which is to say, it eats sugar and poops out carbon dioxide and alcohol. That is its whole ontological deal. And what if you could engineer a yeast that doesn't make alcohol at all? It would be a

biochemical oxymoron, like a tree that grows bacon. In theory, such a yeast could be a building block for na negromdella and every other label on Imbev's shelf. To create this mycological unicorn, the company turned to one of the world's foremost scientists of beer, a yeast whisper of sorts named Kevin Verstrappin whose lab happens to be on the

other side of town from ab Imbev headquarters. Led by its mad beer scientists, the company embarked on a quest almost Frankensteinian in its ambition and implications, with the potential to unlock not just non alcoholic beer but also ana wine, gin whiskey. The god particle of beer holds the potential to be infinite in its beneficence. Get some grain, usually barley, malted. That is, let the seeds germinate, so they start making enzymes that convert their starch into sugar. Grind that up

and put it in boiling water weight add yease weight. Congratulations, you have made beer. Brewers are lovely nerds who delight in making things complicated, but basically that's it. Yet for all that simplicity, beer is also deceptively complex. Amid a zillion variations of method and recipe. Any given beer comprises not only the fizz of carbon dioxide and the sting of alcohol, but also flavor is drawn from the grain, from the bitter flowers of a plant called hops, and

from the biochemical transformations of yeast. Yeast, specifically sachoronomi ss serrebisai, is found just about everywhere on Earth. It's the key to the foods that civilized human kind. Bread for one, beer for another. The first beer like drinks date back some eight thousand years, though brewers didn't know what yeast

was until the mid eighteen hundreds. Early brewers simply relied on the alchemy of fermentation to turn little more than breakfast porridge into a flavorful beverage that also made people feel good and sold for good money. If yeast didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. By nineteen twelve, a b imbev had determined that the combination of flagging beer consumption and flavorless ana beer represented both of business and biotechnological opportunity.

There was just one problem. Non alcoholic beers have historically been, in a word, bad brewers made near beers. By shortening fermentation time, the yeast made less alcohol, and the results tasted like watered down wheaties. No alcohol beer was quite stagnant, says De Shuter. Nobody has really put effort into R and D as De Shooter's team started digging in the tech, improved membranes and reverse osmosis like water purification could filter

out alcohol. Heating beer with steam would cause the alcohol to evaborate. This new generation of NA beer was better, but still had some problems. Beer contains proteins and heating them produced dimethyl sulfide, the aroma of boiled vegetables, components that are not necessarily part of the fresh beer aroma. The shooter says, with the diplomat's touch, So we set ourselves the goal, the dream to make no alcohol beer

as good as regular beer. That's a tall order. Ab Imbev is going to put NA beer into a bottle, That says Budwiser. Really, the shooter insists that this isn't about replacing Bud for a beer agnostic generation. It's about building something new. The way we measure that is with consumer tests. He says, as good as is just probing for preference in the consumer panel. If statistically your beer is as good as the regular beer, you achieve your goal.

Craft brewers would let's just say bag to differ their nerds. They make what they want to drink, whether that means a classic British stout or aged sour beer fermented with ambient, funky yeast, nittered with hops that taste like bong water, and fill with a dash of siracha. They are making, and I say this in all sincerity, drinkable art ab Imbev is playing a very different game. Its NA beers

can't be merely good. They have to be widely appealing, chemically stable, even amid the vagaries of international shipping, consistent year after year. When it comes to non alcoholic beer, that's really hard to do. Sure, ninety five percent of a beer is not alcohol, but that last five percent has always been the obstacle between a premium, scalable NA beer and wet breakfast cereal. Most of what we call

flavor is actually smell. The tongue is a blunt detector of salt, sour, bitter, sweet, and the meaty flavor of umami, but the nose senses a far more subtle spectrum. Alcohol lights up all of that plus more. It is an aroma molecule, a flavor and a smell. It also triggers heat receptors in the mouth, and it has an unctious mouthfeel what a conswer might call body. So its absence leaves of big coal. Adding grains like oats and rice

can amp up mouthfeel. But from the beginning of their foray a decade ago, the av Imbev researchers have been determined to stick with their beer's original ingredients. As a first step in backling over the gaps, they tweaked their brewing process to preserve long chain carbohydrates called dextrins. They're nearly tasteless, but they add viscosity to get alcohol out.

The Shooter's team experimented with a variety of emerging techniques, all of which required expensive new equipment and lots of energy and water just to produce results that always lacked a certain genese qua. Except scientists do know quaw. Dissolved within the alcohol are hundreds of other beery flavor molecules, from the banana smell of isoamyl acetate to the Clovish

spicing nsas of four vinyl guayacole. These volatile aromatic molecules give beer its flavor, and many are secondary metabolites that yeast produces during fermentation. Remove the alcohol and you remove them too. Only one solution was available add them back in afterward. Ruwers working on na beers squirted natural and artificial flavors into the products to cover a lack of

flavor or mask their faults. More intense styles could pull this off with more panache, the toasty slash coffee aromas of a stout like guinness or the tropical fruit happiness of modern India pale ales. We can add other components that make it have more mouth feel. We can add alcohol adjacent chemicals, as Scott la Fontaine, a food chemist at the University of Arkansas who studies beer, that's where understanding fermentation and yeast biochemistry are essential to creating a

beer like adjacent product. Attain's research suggests that the more a beer tastes like sodapop, the more Americans will like it. Not this American, for the record, And sure, the best beer adjacent products can be quite good. Not in my experience, they lose something as they sit in a glass. They taste good at the top, fine in the middle, and then well, I rarely finish them. Without the alcohol matrix, these flavors fizz away more quickly. The Shooter's team decided

on a different approach. Yeas eat sugar and excrete alcohol and all those other flavors secondary metabolites. But what if a yeast made only those other flavors. A b Mbev needed a bacon tree. Luckily, the world has a lot of yeasts. The Lagger style beers, for instance, light, clear and popular, like Budweiser art made with S. Sara Visai, but with a different species, the hybrid s pastorianas. This is why breweries are so careful with their special yeast strains.

When strains reproduce, they mutate, so brewers keep their yeast frozen and only scrape out tiny samples at a time. The original bast batch must never break containment. For me, the yeast is the soul of the beer. The shooter says, if you want to make a Stella Artois, you need to have the Stella artois yeast. The same goes for any of the other beers in the A b Imbev line.

With human nudging, yeasts have evolved into wolfish apex predators that feast on the range of sugars we extract from grains, from smaller, simple, simpler ones like glucose and fructose, to bigger, more complex ones like maltose and malto trios. Brewing yeasts eat them all, but more demure species and strains exists too. These Pomeranians of the yeast world can't handle the big sugars. They still ferment and they create interesting aromatic molecules, but

they produce far less alcohol. The shooters team tried one of these alt yeasts back in twenty seventeen, a yeast from the genus Pichia. During my visit, the shooter offered me a small plastic cup filled with the result, a sweet Beeri like liquid with strong notes of apple now and later candy. It was the wrong yeast. The na yeast of the future would be just as important to a b imbev as the one that makes stella, but the shooter and his team didn't have the background to

find it. He needed help, someone with a uniquely tailored biochemical expertise. He needed a yeast whisperer. Kevin ver Streppen is the director of a lab with a name that's going to make you wish you chose a different major in college, the k u Leuven Institute for Beer Research. He didn't set out to pioneer beer flavor, pursuing a biological engineering degree with notions of delivering the next world

changing vaccine. He eventually made his way to the South Africa lab of Itzach Pretorius, a geneticist studying yeast, specifically wine making yeast. Long story short, I loved it Astreppan says a student in the wine lab learning how to taste wine. That experience also gave Verstreppin his first sense of beer making as a biotechnology. So outwent by plans to come up with a cancer vaccine. He went back to k U Leuven and got a pH d in

Applied biological sciences with a minor in beer. After stints at MIT and Harvard, where Verstreppin co created a widely wildly popular freshman seminar that used beer and brewing to teach basic biochemistry and bioengineering, Leuven offered him a job studying how yeiest's work from brewing beer to manufacturing pharmaceuticals. No one is doing more to link beer's sociocultural history

with its high tech, non alcoholic future. Much of the equipment in Verstreppin's lab is designed to help understand yieese's chemical outputs. Refrigerator sized analytic engines can discern a roma and flavors with molecular precision. A seven foot tall, translucent cabinet contains a miniaturezed assembly line bristling with robot arms dabbing at tiny dishes, each executing thousands of tiny chemical

reactions all at once. Firstreppan, tall and lean like a cyclist and wearing a vantgarde eyeglass frames, is an expert at cracking yets open to see what they can do. The Shooter's team tasked him with finding a yeast with a very specific set of skills, and back at his lab, he had a freezer full of a thousand different kinds of yeast, a genetic library of untapped potential abilities. The lab's high throughput screening technologies could flip through them like

an old rolodex, looking for the right skill sets. You don't have to know the underlying genetic mechanisms. Ver Streppan says, you just have to find good parents. Anyone who follows horse racing where the Westminster Kettel Club understands breeding but in horses and dogs or even barley. Generating traits you want and sifting out those you don't can take years, not yease, they pick up new genes as casually as we might change shirts, and they breed fast. Consider how

quickly a sour dough starter overflows its jar. Combine strains with interesting traits, grow them, test them. If you want one that's resistant to high temperatures, just pull them all into a hot bath. One survives. Guess what, that's your champion. Erristreppin says, with flavor, you do a small fermentation and measure the flavor components, or do a tasting, which is more precise. So that's what we do. Our Struppen's team

started out with more than a thousand candidates. Weeding out the ones that still made too much alcohol got the list down to about twenty. Like a lot of wild yeats. Most of the survivors also produced fenels, molecules that, depending on your childhood, remind you of either dirt or band aids. Phenolic character is typically something we except in a specialty beer, but not in a logger. The shooter says they cut

those two that left them with just two candidates. Unfortunately, one manifested a tendency to kill any other yeast it came into contact with, thanks to its acquisition of a viral gene for a viscous toxin. That wouldn't matter unless the new yeast got into a legacy batch. But since they planned to make non alcoholic beer in the same breweries as alcoholic ones, they'd have to eliminate the trait

they couldn't risk unleashing a serial killer. After a few final rounds of heat treating to stamp out the toxin gene, the champ emerged an ancient sarah VCI collected from plants in Southeast Asia, yeast's evolutionary point of origin. It had a stable phenotype if ate. It ate simple sugar, but didn't consume maltose, and so it made only the tensiest abound of alcohol. It wasn't phenolic. They didn't want to

murder a yeast. As a last hurdle, the Shooter's team took the yeast to a b Imbev's brewery in Mexico, home to a massive fermenter capable of brewing over three hundred thousand gallons at a time. Flavor is fine, but it had to scale. When you make fifteen billion gallons of beer a year, there's no room for a dilettante. This year's delivered as advertised, the company nicknamed it Smart East and started brewing. Belgian beer is very traditional, but

the tradition is constant experimentation. This is the point Ivan Debates wants me to absorb as we sit in the pub attached to its brewery, Roserie de las Sin, on an industrial stretch of the Brussels Canal near the trendy gar Maratin. Designed by Debts and its business partner. It's a concrete walled beer cathedral with giant windows showcasing all the steel tanks and pipes. Next door, we're sipping a bier called Pettibruba, his version of below alcohol brew at

two point five percent alcohol by volume. Its right, hoppy and cheerful. I did that selfishly to save my liver. Debetz says, I never worked so hard on a recipe in my life. As Tibet's tells it, Belgian beer has always refracted styles from around the continent. In fifteen sixteen, Bavaria enacted what was effectively an early national food safety law, the Rhine Heiscobote or Purity Order, mandating that beer, a critically important regional food stuff, be made only with water, barley,

and hops. Belgium combined this Bavarian rigidity with English facility into lower alcohol, sessionable bruise and Southern styles full of wine. Like esters. The oldest Belgian beers, like the Lambics, relied on spontaneous fermentations using ambient yeasts with funkier, weirder flavors. When training introduced in ingredients like annis coriander or the peel of the bitter cacao orange, Belgians threw them into

the mix. It makes sense, in other words, that Belgians would be working on the non alcoholic future of beer. Brewing innovation is inextricable from the culture. It's the home of meccas like the San Sistus Abbey, whose West Veretrin twelve is by some lights the best beer period In the city of Bruges. A brewery founded in fifteen sixty five constructed a two mile underground beer pipeline from its brewery to its bottling plant so that its trucks wouldn't

disturb the medieval downtown. You have to respect a country where every individual brew has its own specially shaped glass. Alcohol, tax policy, fashion and new science can all redirect the development of merging styles. A sociology of taste as Tibets elegantly puts it, but he worries that non alcoholic bruise will always be missing a certain something. The techniques are way, way,

way better than even fifteen years ago, he admits. Still, I believe the base product is not so appealing, and yet the run away success of the non alcoholic craft brewer Athletic suggests that may just be the connoisseur ship talking. Not only is Athletic the biggest NA brewer in the US, it's the country's eighteenth largest brewer overall, with twenty twenty four sales of one hundred thirty million dollars and a valuation of eight hundred million dollars. One big reason is

that people actually like to drink it. Athletic is notably close mouthed about how it makes its beer, unusual in an industry known for co operation and openness, and it's still a munchkin compared to a b imbev, but it's persuasive proof of market and as an added economic inducements.

It's legal for brewers to advertise NA brands alongside popular sports like Formula one, raising appeal to the mainstream in ways that even the King of Beers can't smart yeast may solve a specific corporate problem, but the idea, the concept of new yeasts for new beers might transform the

way we think about flavor writ large. Even with all the high tech analytic and sensory equipment in beer Streppan's lab, assessing something as complex as beer requires the nose and tongue of a trained human expert, some incapable of describing its characteristic aromas with poetic precision using a sheared, quantifiable vocabulary. Where this team term means that smell toasted caramel, grapefruit rind, sour dough bread to define the various distinct sensations in

a single sip of beer, that's not me. I'm just a rider who has consumed a lot of beer. Nevertheless, for a Strepan has invited me to sit in on an evaluation of a couple of the candidate's yeasts he's working on it's time to drink beer for signs. His team tucks me into a private, studied carol like one you'd find in a library. I'm served ambd er amber glasses of beer with numbers affixed to them and a sheaf of worksheets that gives me sat flashbacks. It's harder

than it sounds. Both beers tast like well beer, but the worksheets want to know much more. I'm supposed to rate their maltiness on a scale of one to nine, but also is it malty like cereal or like bread crust or caramel? Is it hoppy like grapefruit or like pine resin any smell of banana? Do I text detect sulfur? Actually one was more sulfury. I checked boxes frantically. My

reporting notes say only I'm too slow. These are the subtle differences between a mind blowing, transnational non alcoholic beer of the future and one you'd poured down the drain. In twenty twenty four, Verstreppen's teen chemically analyzed two hundred fifty Belgian beers and crunched data from a hundred eighty thousand online reviews, which they then combined with judgments from the lab's trained panel. The ones I sat in with

and used machine learning algorithms to detect commonalities. The Belgian beers that people prefer are all likely to have higher levels of protein lactic acid, the sour in sour beers like lambecks, and the molecules ethyl acetate, a kind of solventy chemical smell, and flural honeyed ethyl fenlactate. Add a concoction of those notes to a non alcoholic beer and people will say they like it just as much as

a regular one. Ristreppen says he hopes the mixture of aromas his machine learning work has produced will go beyond creating post structural beer like sensations. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listing, and have a great day.