Análisis del perfil volátil en diferentes variedades de cerveza artesanal e industrial tipo ALE

Abstract

A simple and reliable method was developed for the analysis of four beer styles, through the volatile profiles obtained by headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME), in fiber (DVB / CAR / PDMS), and later by gas chromatography (GC) coupled to mass spectrometry (MS). The analyzed styles of beers were: industrial ale, industrial lager, commercial craft and local craft. The methodology allowed us to identify fifty volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that include ketones, alcohols, esters, terpenes, which are mostly involved with the aroma and flavor of the products. According to the results, phenyl ethyl alcohol, isoamyl acetate, alpha humulene, ethyl myristate, among others that are commonly considered compounds that provide better sensory characteristics in beers, stood out for their concentration within ale-type beers. In turn, other compounds were characteristic in each of the beer styles analyzed. The profiles not only differ in their composition but also differ in the concentration of the VOCs in common, which can also lead to significant differences regarding their quality and organoleptic characteristics. Principal component analysis (PCA) is an unsupervised multivariate analysis technique that simplifies the complexity of the data by transforming it into a few dimensions that show their trends and correlations (Vidal et al., 2020). PCA was performed to determine the correlations between the compounds (chromatographic peaks), their retention times, and the styles of beers used, finding that Ale-type beers are strongly characterized by the variety and abundance of compounds compared to Lager beers. Finally, an exploratory cluster analysis was carried out, which generated 3 groups of beers analyzed, which explained 40% of the variability of the data.