Kombucha Is So Yesterday, The New Hotness Is Probiotic Beer


You want probiotics in your belly. To administer the beneficial, digestive-aiding bacteria into your tummy you can get probiotics from foods such as yogurt (nah), kombucha (nah), kimchi (nah), or saurkraut (I’m not eating a hot dog). But what if you could get the goodness of probiotics in a delicious and refreshing beer! YES! Researchers have recently found a way to incorporate probiotics into beer!

Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have done the work of gods by creating a beer that is chock-full of probiotics. The patent-pending beer was invented by Chan Mei Zhi Alcine, a fourth-year student from the Food Science and Technology Program. Alcine’s group generally makes “consumer dairy-based probiotic beverages daily,” but took on the challenge of making a probiotic brew. It took Alcine nine months of experiments to get the right situation where probiotic bacteria would play nice with yeast and hop acids during the brewing process.

This sour beer is loaded with Lactobacillus paracasei L26. “For this beer, we used a lactic acid bacterium as a probiotic micro-organism,” Alcine said. “It will utilize sugars present in the wort to produce sour-tasting lactic acid, resulting in a beer with sharp and tart flavors. The final product, which takes around a month to brew, has an alcohol content of about 3.5 percent.”

“While good bacteria are often present in food that have been fermented, there are currently no beers in the market that contain probiotics,” Alcine says in the release. She also added that “as a believer of achieving a healthy diet through consuming probiotics, this is a natural choice for me when I picked a topic for my final-year project.” You’re doing the wrong final-year projects.

The researchers have filed for a patent for their probiotic beer and are currently looking for industry partners to produce and sell their gut-friendly beer. So don’t expect probiotic beer at your local Whole Foods anytime soon. But when it does become available you’ll be able to proudly declare that you don’t have a beer belly, you have a probiotics belly.


[Vinepair]