IF YOUR beer starts to taste funny in the coming months, don’t blame the
barman. It could be that the brewery has run out of an arcane fungicide
antibiotic vital for checking the quality of the yeast from which beer is
brewed.
Cycloheximide is added to samples of brewer’s yeast to test it for bacteria
that would otherwise spoil beer. “This compound kills off yeast but not the
bacteria which make your beer smell and taste awful,” says Mark Lee of Brewing
Research International in Nutfield, Surrey. Without the substance, brewers would
struggle to spot the troublesome bacteria, which produce…
