Got foam? In search of the perfect beer

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>> Charlie Bamforth: I am Charlie Bamforth I'm the professor of Malting Brewing Science at UC Davis.

music Many of the great scientific discoveries were made in the brewing profession. Things as fundamental as PH and the use of control micro organisms and fermentation design all came out of the brewing industry. Our focus at the moment is on the beer itself. When you pour out a beer, the first thing you see is a foam so we do a lot of work on bubbles and how to achieve a nice, attractive and stable foam on beer. We've done a lot of work to show that people are influenced by the foam. If you show people beer with foam and beer without foam they will always score the one that's got the foam as being better and so psychologically there's this impact. They say it all tastes better. What they're looking at is the foam and they're making the judgments on that basis. Today we're looking at an instrument for measuring foam stability of beer. This instrument comes out of Holland and what it does is measures the conductivity in the foam so there are needles which go into the top of the foam and they detect the conductivity. As the foam subsides so that linkage is lost and the instrument responds by lowering the needles so that contact is once more established and so as the foam collapses the needles go down and the instrument plots that and measures the rate at which they descend and that of course is in proportion to how stable the foam is. All I'm trying to do is to educate people about beer, that means teach the students, it means do research on beer and it means going out and about in the great wide world, telling people about the wonders of this marvelous beverage

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