It’s a rather difficult choice to make when asked to pick between your health and your tipple. However, researchers at National University of Singapore (NUS) have created a special brew of beer, which comes with Lactobacillus paracasei L26.
The beer was invented by Chan Mei Zhi Alcine, a fourth year student at the university. “While good bacteria are often present in food that have been fermented, there are currently no beers in the market that contain probiotics,” explained Chan. “Developing sufficient counts of live probiotics in beer is a challenging feat as beers contain hop acids that prevent the growth and survival of probiotics. 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.”
By propagating the probiotic and yeast in pure cultures, and modifying conventional brewing and fermentation processes, Chan managed to increase and maintain the live counts of the strain of probiotic. “The final product, which takes around a month to brew, has an alcohol content of about 3.5 per cent,” she said.
