This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

The Alagash Brewing Company in Maine makes a lot of bottle condition beers.

Those are brews that get their carbonation by

fermenting a second time in the bottle, has yeast belt out CO2.

And because they do a lot of bottle conditioning, they're very meticulous about monitoring

package pressures.

It's a way for them to follow the progression of this

re-fermentation in the bottle.

Thomas Shellhammer is a brewing scientist at Oregon State University who freely acknowledges

it's a fun job science and beer anyway not long ago aligash noticed some very high

pressures in some of their bottles not quite exploding but alarming enough for them to give Shellhammer a call.

What he and his colleague Kaylin Kirkpatrick found was that Hopps, the Bittering Agent in Beers, might be to blame,

because the aromatic flowers contain enzymes that can chew up

starch. Now typically when hot flowers are added during the initial cooking of the

fermentable brew those key enzymes are denatured, and thus the flowers only roll is as a

flavoring agent. But as the demand for hoppy beers has grown,

brewers are looking for more tricks to get those juicy, fruity herbal aromas into their beers.

So they've been doing what's called dry hopping,

dumping loads of hops into the beer during or after fermentation

rather than during the initial boil.

So there's sort of an upward limit as to how much hops you would want to put in the kettle

...