On top of improving the taste of non-alcoholic beer, the method is also far more sustainable than the existing techniques, according to the researchers. First of all, aroma hops are mainly farmed on the west coast of the US, which caused the need for extensive transportation and cooling down the crops in refrigerators.
Secondly, hops demand lots of water – more accurately you need 2-7 tons of water to grow one kilogram of hops. This combined makes it a not very climate-friendly production.
“With our method, we skip aroma hops altogether and thereby also the water and the transportation. This means that one kilogram of hops aroma can be produced with more than 10.000 times less water and more than 100 times less CO2,” said Sotirios Kampranis.
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