Beer goes academic
• Dec 29th, 2008 • Category: Beer News
We wrote our senior thesis about rap, which we thought was pretty cool, but Monique Haakensen — a pathology and laboratory medicine PhD candidate at University of Saskatchewann — topped us by studying beer. Specifically, the 26-year-old devoted countless hours to examining the science of spoiled beer and “has helped discover three new methods of detecting beer-spoiling bacteria, including a DNA-based technique.”
According to Haakensen, “What we’ve done here is, by using DNA methods, we can actually figure out in a matter of one to two days if that beer will spoil.”
The University of Saskatchewann boasts one of two labs devoted to the study of beer (the other is in the Asahi brewery in Japan). She has won scholarships from breweries including Cargill Malt, Coors and Miller, and presented her research at the World Brewing Congress in Hawaii last summer. Pretty soon, Bitter Beer Face will be a thing of the past.
