A Metabolomic Approach to Beer Characterization

The consumers’ interest towards beer consumption has been on the rise during the past
decade: new approaches and ingredients get tested, expanding the traditional recipe for brewing
beer. As a consequence, the field of “beeromics” has also been constantly growing, as well as the
demand for quick and exhaustive analytical methods. In this study, we propose a combination of
nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and chemometrics to characterize beer. 1H‐NMR
spectra were collected and then analyzed using chemometric tools. An interval‐based approach was
applied to extract chemical features from the spectra to build a dataset of resolved relative
concentrations. One aim of this work was to compare the results obtained using the full spectrum
and the resolved approach: with a reasonable amount of time needed to obtain the resolved dataset,
we show that the resolved information is comparable with the full spectrum information, but
interpretability is greatly improved.