The changing face of microbial quality control practices in the brewing industry: Introducing mass spectrometry proteomic fingerprinting for microbial identification

Abstract

Microbiological quality control testing in breweries is essential for maintaining high product quality and should be performed routinely. The effects of microbial contamination, derived from organisms including bacteria, wild yeast and mould, can range from comparatively minor changes in beer flavour and fermentation performance to gross flavour and aroma defects, turbidity problems and reduced yeast performance. Further implications of batch contamination include significant financial loss and decreased consumer confidence. This review discusses current microbiology testing techniques and their limitations, then focuses on new developments and technologies for routine microbiological control testing. The adoption of new technologies such as proteomic fingerprinting by mass spectrometry would allow breweries to conduct more extensive microbiological analyses that are currently cost‐ and time‐prohibitive, particularly for small breweries. Copyright © 2017 The Institute of Brewing & Distilling

Rapid separation and identification of beer spoilage bacteria by inertial microfluidics and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry

“…low alcohol content, absence of hops, elevated pH). 52 This approach addresses a limiting factor for implementation of the MALDI-TOF MS for quality control, which is the need to enrich and isolate using conventional cultivation strategies. 50,53,54 The use of an inertial microfluidics platform offers a solution that allows sampling of products from each fermentation batch for subsequent identification using the MALDI Biotyper, according to standard sample preparation protocols.…”

Nanopore based sequencing enables easy and accurate identification of yeasts in breweries

“…For yeast identification, internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region sequences, which are one of the most widely used barcoding regions of yeast and fungi, have been used ( 3,17 ) . In addition, sequencing the D1/D2 region of the 26S rDNA gene is used for distinguishing between yeast species ( 18 ) .…”