According to the prevailing opinion, wheat beer should smell more like banana or clove.

I have just poured a beer for which the latter should apply: Maisel's Weisse Original.

Can you confirm a clove smell?

Uwe Ebbinghaus

Editor in the features section.

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Thomas A. Vilgis:

(smells in his glass) That doesn't smell of carnation.

I have clove with me.

Do you find clove in the beer?

I would say that at most a tenth or a twentieth of the smell in your spice jar can be guessed at.

I have another sample with me - with the aroma that provides the main aroma of cloves: eugenol.

Smell it.

It smells different again and is even further away from the smell of wheat beer.

It smells rather leathery, woody.

And I brought something else with me: smoked cooked ham.

Smell it and think of the typical meat smell away.

Then we are closer to the matter.

There's a lot of closeness there.

One must now admit that what constitutes the main smell of the smoke on the cooked ham is also present in a very weakened form in the case of eugenol or cloves - but by no means dominant. By the way, the main aroma of smoked ham is 4-ethenyl-2-methoxyphenol. And this can actually arise during the brewing process. Eugenol, on the other hand, is in vain because of the enzymatic activities involved in brewing. It would only get into the beer if it was put in a wooden barrel, in a flamed one. The thing about the beer gap in the spicy aromas, the phenylpropanoids, is somehow a quibble, I admit that. You have to look at the molecules. If you look at this, however, the finding is unambiguous, as you can see on this diagram.

No beer creates the class of spicy aromas, except those that have matured in wooden barrels.

For food pairing, on the other hand, the combination of beer and food, this aroma gap in beer creates interesting possibilities.

You can fill the gap with eugenol and other flavors from this class, for example.

How did you come across the Bierlücke?

Did you notice when dealing with wheat beer: It does not smell like cloves.

Or did you start from the brewing process and theoretically found the gap?

I have dealt intensively with flavors in my books and have found in many experiments with beer: Eugenol is simply not recognizable here.

I then looked at the research literature and saw it confirmed: Eugenol cannot be produced in the fermentation process with yeast.

But you can understand the banana aroma of wheat beer?

Yes, the top-fermenting yeasts in wheat prefer to produce fruit esters, mostly with the typical banana aroma. From the yeast perspective, this is also logical. There are wild yeasts, brewer's yeast is just a special breed. Yeasts are single-celled organisms that can fly around, but not so well. Often times they sit on top of fruit, and in the wild it is wise that the smell that arises when yeast ferment fruit develops strong fruit flavors. Because these attract the fruit flies and other insects. These settle on the fruit, feast on the odors produced or intensified by the yeast and eat or suck up something. And the moment they fly away, there are many yeasts on each leg, which are carried on to a new substrate, a new breeding ground. This is how yeasts can multiply well.