Al was just talking about why one might drink Heineken… I saw a billboard the other day for an advertisement for Heineken. It was a picture of a green Heineken bottle on its side and the caption was “Adirondack Green”. (I live near the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York) While the bottle looks cold and refreshing with the condensation sweating down the side, I’m sorry, I’m not ignorant… that green bottle has ruined the beer inside.

You see, hops and yeast don’t mix well with sunlight. It gives beer that skunky taste I’m sure you have come across at one point in time. Chemically speaking:

Brewing chemists attribute skunky flavor to 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol, a constituent of skunk spray. This compound arises from a reaction that light triggers within the beer, and the resulting taste can overwhelm other flavors.
“Humans are very sensitive to this compound,” says Denis De Keukeleire of Ghent University in Belgium. 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol is detectable in quantities as small as 0.004 microgram (µg) per liter. This amount can form in minutes when beer is exposed to bright sunlight, he says.

Riboflavin, a compound produced by yeast during fermentation, absorbs energy from light at wavelengths of 350 to 500 nanometers (nm). It transfers the energy to iso-alpha acids, the compounds that give beer bitterness. They then release free radicals—small, unstable chemical fragments—that react with sulfur compounds produced by the yeast. The result is the offending thiol.

Many brewers who want to prevent skunky flavor simply put their product in brown bottles, which block visible light of wavelengths under 500 nm. Some of the brewers who prefer to use clear or green bottles, which let in the problematic wavelengths, use hop pellets that contain chemically modified alpha acids. The altered structure, which contains additional hydrogen atoms, no longer forms 3-methyl–but-2-ene-1-thiol. *

Is “green” the only thing Heineken has to hang on to advertise? I’d say they need to come up with something else but really it doesn’t really matter to me unless they change the color of the bottle they package it in.

Subscriber “Max” (our reliable source) tells us that Heineken comes in a brown bottle… did you now that? (I didn’t) Apparently it does but you will need to cross international waters to find it. I wonder what that tastes like? I’m sure it is quite different from what you and I in the U.S. know.

* via http://www.sciencenews.org/

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