Caracterização do amargor da cerveja em microcervejarias da cidade de Ponta Grossa - PR

Abstract

Currently the craft beer market has grown exponentially in several regions from Brazil, occupying important space in the segment of fermented beverages. However, the lack of competitiveness of microbreweries with large industries results in the impracticability economic to improve microbreweries’ infrastructure, which consequently generates few investments capable to analyze parameters responsible for the quality of the final product. In view of this fact, the present work has the objective of characterizing the bitterness of microbreweries’ beers from Ponta Grossa city, Parana. Each of the ingredients present into the beer have important functions in the manufacturing process, with hops being the main responsible for the bitter taste. Besides the hop contributes to the microbiological stability of the foam. Bitterness is one of the classificatory parameters for beer style and can be quantified by several methods, however, the one used in this work refers to visible ultraviolet radiation spectrophotometry. This method measures the presence of iso-a-acids in beers from the spectral absorbance at a wavelength of 275 nm, and subsequently, this absorbance convert itself into International Bitterness Unit (IBU), the international unit used for this purpose. Beers of three microbreweries from Ponta Grossa-PR were analyzed. The values of IBU analyzed and calculated by the microbreweries were compared from the collected data and it was found that the experimental values presented variation from -25.00 to + 43.33% in relation to the values calculated by the manufacturers. However, all samples kept within the range of specified bitterness for the analyzed beer style. Against this circumstance, there is investment margin for improvement in the use of inputs used in production, which would leads to an improvement in the quality of the final product and consequent savings in production costs.