杏吧原创

IF YOUR beer starts to taste funny in the coming months, don鈥檛 blame the
barman. It could be that the brewery has run out of an arcane fungicide
antibiotic vital for checking the quality of the yeast from which beer is
brewed.

Cycloheximide is added to samples of brewer鈥檚 yeast to test it for bacteria
that would otherwise spoil beer. 鈥淭his compound kills off yeast but not the
bacteria which make your beer smell and taste awful,鈥� says Mark Lee of Brewing
Research International in Nutfield, Surrey. Without the substance, brewers would
struggle to spot the troublesome bacteria, which produce acetic acid and give
beer a vinegary off-flavour.

But BRI is worried. Tanabe Seiyaku, the chemicals company in Osaka, Japan,
which holds the sole rights to manufacture cycloheximide, a nasty substance
which can cause cancer and birth defects, does not make the stuff. And remaining
stocks are dwindling fast. 鈥淭his chemical has become the cornerstone of brewing
microbiology, there are no known substitutes,鈥� BRI has told brewers.

Suppliers have hiked prices for their remaining stocks from as little as
拢25 per gram before the crisis to as much as 拢1000 per gram now.
Some suppliers are restricting supplies to just a gram per customer per year.
Lee says that if stocks ran out altogether, some foul-tasting beer could
theoretically reach consumers. A more likely scenario, he says, is that the
industry will be forced to ditch vast quantities of unsaleable beer. To avert
the crisis, BRI is launching a research task force to find alternatives to
cycloheximide.