As the brewing industry expands and new beer styles, such as hazy pale ales, emerge, brewers are constantly looking for new ways to analyze the composition of their beers to preserve the carefully crafted sensory quality of their products.
However, analyzing how the molecules in beer affect its flavour is challenging because of the sheer amount of different types of molecules present in the beverage. To address this issue, our research team at the University of Victoria has developed a user-friendly lab-on-a-chip device to investigate how we can add more hop flavours to beer by making oil-in-beer emulsions.
Lab-on-a-chip, or microfluidic, technologies are tiny devices usually made from a transparent, rubbery material that can be used to transport and analyze liquids in pipes the size of a human hair.
