Bitterant

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A bitterant (or bittering agent ) is a chemical that is added to a product to make it smell or taste bitter. Bitterants are commonly used as aversive agents to discourage the inhalation or ingestion of toxic substances.

Contents

Examples of use

Examples of bitterants

Bitterness scales

The threshold for stimulation of bitter taste by quinine averages a concentration of 8 μM (8 micromolar). [7] The taste thresholds of other bitter substances are rated relative to quinine, which is thus given a reference index of 1. [7] [8] For example, Brucine has an index of 11, is thus perceived as intensely more bitter than quinine, and is detected at a much lower solution threshold. [7] The most bitter substance known is the synthetic chemical denatonium, which has an index of 1,000. [8] It is used as an aversive agent (a bitterant) that is added to toxic substances to prevent accidental ingestion. This was discovered in 1958 during research on lignocaine, a local anesthetic, by MacFarlan Smith of Gorgie, Edinburgh, Scotland.[ citation needed ]

Brewery

Beer bitterness scales attempt to rate the perceived relative bitterness of beer. The bitterness of beer is provided by compounds such as isohumulones from hops used during brewing.

The International Bittering Units scale, or simply IBU scale, is measured through the use of a spectrophotometer and solvent extraction [9] a calculation is performed on this absorbance to give a result in IBU. [10] This technique was adopted at the same time as another method based on measuring the concentration (in milligrams per litre; parts per million w/v) of IAA isomerized α acids in a beer, causing some confusion among small-scale brewers. [11] The American Society of Brewing Chemists, in the introduction to its methods on measuring bitterness, points out some differences between the results of the two methods:

While the results of the IAA methods are practically identical to those obtained by the [I]BU method for beer brewed with fresh hops, the IAAs of beer brewed with old or poorly stored hops, and with certain special hop extracts, can be significantly lower than the [I]BU figure. [9]

The European Bitterness Units scale, often abbreviated as EBU, is a bitterness scale [12] in which lower values are generally "less bitter" and higher values "more bitter". The scale and method are defined by the European Brewery Convention, and the numerical value should be the same as of the International Bitterness Units scale (IBU), defined in co-operation with the American Society of Brewing Chemists. [13] However, the exact process of determining EBU and IBU values differs slightly, which may in theory result with slightly smaller values for EBU than IBU. [14]

IBU cannot be determined by perceived bitterness. For example, the bittering effect of hops is less noticeable in beers with a high quantity of malt, so a higher bitterness is needed in heavier beers to balance the flavour and achieve the same perceived bitterness as compared to a lighter beer. For example, an Imperial Stout may have an IBU of 50, but will taste less bitter than an English Bitter with an IBU of 30, because the latter beer uses much less malt than the former. After around 100 IBU, hop utilization is so poor that the number ceases to be meaningful in regard to taste, although continued hop additions will increase bitterness. Light lagers without much bitterness will generally have 8–20 IBU, while an India Pale Ale may have 60–100 IBU or more. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beer</span> Alcoholic drink made from fermented cereal grains

Beer is the oldest and most widely consumed type of alcoholic drink in the world, and the third most popular drink overall after potable water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cereal grains—most commonly from malted barley, though wheat, maize (corn), rice, and oats are also used. During the brewing process, fermentation of the starch sugars in the wort produces ethanol and carbonation in the resulting beer. Most modern beer is brewed with hops, which add bitterness and other flavours and act as a natural preservative and stabilizing agent. Other flavouring agents such as gruit, herbs, or fruits may be included or used instead of hops. In commercial brewing, the natural carbonation effect is often removed during processing and replaced with forced carbonation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hops</span> Flower used for beer and other alcohol

Hops are the flowers of the hop plant Humulus lupulus, a member of the Cannabaceae family of flowering plants. They are used primarily as a bittering, flavouring, and stability agent in beer, to which, in addition to bitterness, they impart floral, fruity, or citrus flavours and aromas. Hops are also used for various purposes in other beverages and herbal medicine. The hops plants have separate female and male plants, and only female plants are used for commercial production. The hop plant is a vigorous, climbing, herbaceous perennial, usually trained to grow up strings in a field called a hopfield, hop garden, or hop yard when grown commercially. Many different varieties of hops are grown by farmers around the world, with different types used for particular styles of beer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Denatured alcohol</span> Ethanol with additives to discourage recreational consumption

Denatured alcohol is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage its recreational consumption. It is sometimes dyed so that it can be identified visually. Pyridine and methanol, each and together, make denatured alcohol poisonous; and denatonium makes it bitter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Denatonium</span> Chemical compound

Denatonium, usually available as denatonium benzoate and as denatonium saccharide (BITTERANT-s), is the most bitter chemical compound known, with bitterness thresholds of 0.05 ppm for the benzoate and 0.01 ppm for the saccharide. It was discovered in 1958 during research on local anesthetics by MacFarlan Smith of Edinburgh, Scotland, and registered under the trademark Bitrex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brucine</span> Poisonous alkaloid similar to strychnine

Brucine, is an alkaloid closely related to strychnine, most commonly found in the Strychnos nux-vomica tree. Brucine poisoning is rare, since it is usually ingested with strychnine, and strychnine is more toxic than brucine. In synthetic chemistry, it can be used as a tool for stereospecific chemical syntheses.

Degrees Brix is a measure of the dissolved solids in a liquid, and is commonly used to measure dissolved sugar content of an aqueous solution. One degree Brix is 1 gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution and represents the strength of the solution as percentage by mass. If the solution contains dissolved solids other than pure sucrose, then the °Bx only approximates the dissolved solid content. For example, when one adds equal amounts of salt and sugar to equal amounts of water, the degrees of refraction (BRIX) of the salt solution rises faster than the sugar solution. The °Bx is traditionally used in the wine, sugar, carbonated beverage, fruit juice, fresh produce, maple syrup and honey industries.

The Standard Reference Method or SRM is one of several systems modern brewers use to specify beer color. Determination of the SRM value involves measuring the attenuation of light of a particular wavelength (430 nm) in passing through 1 cm of the beer, expressing the attenuation as an absorption and scaling the absorption by a constant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beer style</span> Differentiation and categories for different types of beer

Beer styles differentiate and categorise beers by colour, flavour, strength, ingredients, production method, recipe, history, or origin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mash ingredients</span> Product of mashing

Mash ingredients, mash bill, mashbill, or grain bill are the materials that brewers use to produce the wort that they then ferment into alcohol. Mashing is the act of creating and extracting fermentable and non-fermentable sugars and flavor components from grain by steeping it in hot water, and then letting it rest at specific temperature ranges to activate naturally occurring enzymes in the grain that convert starches to sugars. The sugars separate from the mash ingredients, and then yeast in the brewing process converts them to alcohol and other fermentation products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gustducin</span> G protein

Gustducin is a G protein associated with taste and the gustatory system, found in some taste receptor cells. Research on the discovery and isolation of gustducin is recent. It is known to play a large role in the transduction of bitter, sweet and umami stimuli. Its pathways are many and diverse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Brewery Convention</span>

The European Brewery Convention (EBC) is an organisation representing the technical and scientific interests of the brewing sector in Europe. The EBC defines itself as the scientific and technological arm of The Brewers of Europe. Among brewers, EBC is perhaps best known for the EBC units measuring beer and wort colour, as well as EBC units for quantifying turbidity in beer. Equally, the EBC congress is recognised globally as a significant meeting event for the world's brewing, malting and beer fermentation scientists and technologists, taking place every two years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alvinne</span> Brewery in Zwevegem, Belgium

Alvinne is a small brewery in the hamlet of Moen near the Belgian city of Zwevegem, founded in 2002.

A bittering agent is a flavoring agent added to a food or beverage to impart a bitter taste, possibly in addition to other effects. While many substances are bitter to a greater or lesser degree, a few substances are used specifically for their bitterness, especially to balance other flavors, such as sweetness. Notable beverage examples include caffeine, found naturally in tea and coffee and added to many soft drinks, hops in beer, and quinine in tonic water.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Taste</span> Sense of chemicals on the tongue

The gustatory system or sense of taste is the sensory system that is partially responsible for the perception of taste (flavor). Taste is the perception produced or stimulated when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with taste receptor cells located on taste buds in the oral cavity, mostly on the tongue. Taste, along with olfaction and trigeminal nerve stimulation, determines flavors of food and other substances. Humans have taste receptors on taste buds and other areas, including the upper surface of the tongue and the epiglottis. The gustatory cortex is responsible for the perception of taste.

When drinking beer, there are many factors to be considered. Principal among them are bitterness, the variety of flavours present in the beverage and their intensity, alcohol content, and colour. Standards for those characteristics allow a more objective and uniform determination to be made on the overall qualities of any beer.

Aversive agents are unpleasantly flavored substances added to poisonous household goods to discourage children and animals from consuming them. Aversive agents are not intended to be harmful, only unpleasant. For example, to prevent children from consuming poisonous anti-freeze, which has a sweet flavor due to the ethylene glycol, an aversive agent is added, which gives the anti-freeze an unpleasant taste. There are two primary classes of aversive agents: bitterants, chemicals producing a bitter flavor, and pungent agents, chemicals producing an unpleasantly pungent flavor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archipelago Brewery</span> Beverage company in Singapore

The Archipelago Brewery is a Singaporean brewery owned by Heineken Asia Pacific. It labels itself as "Singapore's Craft Brewery".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Food grading</span> Inspection and sorting of foodstuffs for various parameters

Food grading involves the inspection, assessment and sorting of various foods regarding quality, freshness, legal conformity and market value. Food grading is often done by hand, in which foods are assessed and sorted. Machinery is also used to grade foods, and may involve sorting products by size, shape and quality. For example, machinery can be used to remove spoiled food from fresh product.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beer chemistry</span> Brewery science and beer chemical composition

The chemical compounds in beer give it a distinctive taste, smell and appearance. The majority of compounds in beer come from the metabolic activities of plants and yeast and so are covered by the fields of biochemistry and organic chemistry. The main exception is that beer contains over 90% water and the mineral ions in the water (hardness) can have a significant effect upon the taste.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ale</span> Type of beer brewed using a warm fermentation method

Ale is a type of beer brewed using a warm fermentation method, resulting in a sweet, full-bodied and fruity taste. Historically, the term referred to a drink brewed without hops.

References

  1. ↑ Cheryl Hogue, Safer Antifreeze Bill Is Moving Fast, Chemical & Engineering News, 31 July 2006, pp. 39-41. Access date: 3 January 2009.
  2. ↑ Dornbush, Johnathon (2 March 2017). "Nintendo Switch Cartridges Taste Terrible". IGN . Retrieved 3 March 2017.
  3. ↑ Baraniuk, Chris (2 March 2017). "Nintendo Switch cartridges 'taste so bad'". BBC News. Retrieved 7 March 2017.
  4. ↑ "New trend: Putting disgusting Nintendo Switch cartridges in your mouth". The Daily Dot. 6 March 2017. Retrieved 7 March 2017.
  5. ↑ Gartenberg, Chaim (29 September 2020). "Duracell's new coin batteries have a bitter coating that makes them taste terrible". The Verge. Retrieved 29 September 2020.
  6. ↑ Final Report Study of Aversive Agents (PDF). Consumer Product Safety Commission United States of America. 18 November 1992. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 June 2011. Retrieved 15 November 2010.
  7. 1 2 3 Guyton, Arthur C. (1991) Textbook of Medical Physiology. (8th ed). Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders
  8. 1 2 McLaughlin S., Margolskee R.F. (1994). "The Sense of Taste". American Scientist. 82 (6): 538–545.
  9. 1 2 "Methods of Analysis: Beer 23. Beer Bitterness". American Society of Brewing Chemists. 1996. pp. 1–4. Retrieved 9 October 2015.[ permanent dead link ]
  10. ↑ Rabin & Forget 1998, p. 43.
  11. ↑ "What Is an IBU...Really?". Basic Brewing Radio. Season 4. Episode 12. 20 March 2008.
  12. ↑ Lehigh Valley Homebrewers (2007). "Beer and Brewing Glossary". Archived from the original on 24 September 2008. Retrieved 5 August 2009. IBUs (International Bittering Units) - The accepted worldwide standard for measuring bitterness in beer, also known as EBU, based on the estimated alpha acid percentage of the hops used and the length of time they are boiled.
  13. ↑ European Brewery Convention. "The Analysis Committee". Archived from the original on 19 May 2009. Retrieved 5 August 2009. The EBC Analysis Committee also works closely together with the 'American Society of Brewing Chemists' (ASBC) to establish so-called 'International methods' with world-wide recognition of applicability. A partnership declaration between EBC and ASBC has been signed. The integration of the IOB methods of analysis and EBC methods is nearing completion.
  14. ↑ ajdelange (11 June 2009). "Difference between IBU and EBU" . Retrieved 5 August 2009. Because the absorption decreases pretty quickly with time at the completion of extraction the EBC reported value will, in general, be a little smaller than ASBC reported value unless the beer requires centrifugation. For all practical considerations the two systems should give the same results.
  15. ↑ Crouch 2006, p. 263–.

Sources

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