P-28 - Innovative Strategy for Enhancing Beer Body by Controlling Residual Sugar Composition

We previously found that increasing the sweetness of beer was effective for enhancing the body of non-alcoholic beer and low-alcohol beer. One way to enhance sweetness is to increase residual sugar. However, because consumers are increasingly health conscious, simply adding sugars to increase the residual sugar content is not acceptable. Therefore, we aimed to increase the sweetness without increasing the carbohydrate content. Here, we investigated controlling sweetness using enzymes during mashing. Beer contains sugars with varying degrees of polymerization and, generally, the sweetness of sugar decreases as the degree of polymerization increases. Approximately 50%, and in some cases > 80%, of the sugar in beer made by conventional methods is dextrin, which is believed to improve mouthfeel. However, dextrin is not very sweet and its contribution to the beer body is minimal compared with the contributions of other low-molecular-weight sugars at the same concentration. We investigated the apparent attenuation limit (AAL) and sugar composition of wort when mashing was performed using a combination of dextrin degradation by debranching enzymes, sugar transfer by α-glucosidase, and sugar degradation by glucoamylase. Appropriate combination of enzymes resulted in beer with unprecedented sweetness over a wide AAL range. We produced two types of beer with the same AAL. In the control, the degree of starch decomposition was adjusted using the traditional method by extending the mashing time and adding glucoamylase. For the test sample, the degree of decomposition was adjusted using our new method, which combined debranching enzymes, α-glucosidase, and glucoamylase. Dextrin accounted for 60% of the sugars in the control sample. In the test sample, the dextrin content decreased to 30% and the content of low-molecular-weight non-fermentable sugars increased. The relative sweetness calculated from the sugar composition in the test sample was 2.5 times that in the control sample. When these two low-alcohol beers were subjected to consumer surveys, the ratings for the taste and purchase intention of the beer with higher sweetness were significantly higher (p < 0.10) than for the beer with lower sweetness. Controlling the composition of sugars in the extract rather than just the alcohol content and apparent extract allows for creation of attractive beers that better meet consumer needs.