IF YOU are pouring yourself one of the fine beers brewed at Europe鈥檚 Trappist monasteries this holiday season, spare a thought for the Cistercian monks behind your tipple. Their beer sales suffer at the hands of breweries trading falsely on the monastic name.
The monks sell their ales to generate cash for their monasteries, with any excess going to charitable causes. Sales suffer at the hands of copycat brews that trade on the monastic moniker without any Trappist connections. A test that can distinguish Trappist beer from a cheaper copy could soon put paid to that.
Of the hundreds of Trappist monasteries worldwide, just seven brew the famous beers: those at Achel, Chimay, Orval, Rochefort, Westvleteren and Westmalle in Belgium, and at La Trappe in the Netherlands. In the latest edition of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (), Claude Guillou of the European Commission鈥檚 Institute for the Health and Consumer Protection in Ispra, Italy, says little is being done to defend the beers against commercial breweries who use heavy advertising to suggest a 鈥渕onastic origin鈥�.
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鈥淭rappist beers are interesting because each abbey has its own recipe built over centuries and kept secret 鈥� so their taste is very specific to each,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e wondered if their characteristics are distinct enough to be reflected in their analytical profile.鈥�
聯Each Trappist beer has its own secret recipe. The abbeys will welcome this authentication method聰
So his team used a technique called liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) to seek out telltale profiles of compounds metabolised in the Trappists鈥� unique fermentation process. LC-MS separates out chemical groups of interest and then ionises each for injection into a mass spectrometer 鈥� where the array of molecular weights of the compounds can be identified. In multiple tests, the 鈥渇ingerprint鈥� this generated for one Trappist beer, , allowed them to 鈥渃learly identify鈥� the monks鈥� brew from 232 other beers.
It鈥檚 a worthy cause, says Iain Loe, communications manager of the . 鈥淭here has long been confusion and perhaps some deceit in some bars about the sale of Abbey-style beers,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he Trappist breweries should welcome this new way of authenticating their beers.鈥�
