Synbio salvages alcohol-free beer

Beer made with EvodiaBio’s natural aromas could fool you. Most of us can pick out a non-alcoholic beer, but EvodiaBio, a bio-industrial company based in Copenhagen, has found a way to return beer’s distinctive flavors and fragrance to the alcohol-free drinks. Traditional brewing relies on aromas from hops, which are intensively farmed, consume large amounts of water and produce a high CO₂ footprint. Instead, EvodiaBio has engineered baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to produce custom aroma blends for brewers, reducing water usage by over 10,000-fold and CO₂ release by 100-fold.

Non-alcoholic beers are typically less satisfying than their boozy counterparts. They suffer from poor taste because the processes used to lower the alcohol content also strip the volatile flavors derived from hops. Now EvodiaBio, the most recent startup admitted into Copenhagen’s BioInnovation Institute Venture Lab program, is using metabolic engineering to produce high-value isoprenoids. Two of the company’s co-founders, Simon Dusséaux and Sotirios Kampranis, working at the University of Copenhagen, engineered pathways in yeast peroxisomes, the organelles that normally oxidize fatty acids, repurposing them to produce geranyl diphosphate, a universal ten-carbon isoprenoid precursor of many high-value fragrance and flavors used in the food and cosmetics industries. These volatile aroma compounds have until now been extremely challenging to produce using cell factories. “We asked ourselves: what is good for sustainability and society? With non-alcoholic beer, we can have an immediate impact,” says Dusséaux, EvodiaBio’s CSO.

EvodiaBio received $610,000 from the BioInnovation Institute, an independent foundation established by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, for its first year.

Credit: Cultura RM / Alamy Stock Photo