Advances in anti-staling brewer’s yeast

Abstract:

Brewer’s yeast is crucial in beer fermentation, mainly beer flavor diversity and stability. Beer flavor stability is one of the most influential beer quality aspects, and screening or breeding brewer’s yeast with enhanced anti-staling capacity will be an effective solution. In recent decades, with the progress of genetic engineering and detailed description of brewer’s yeast genome, great efforts have been made to improve brewer’s yeast. This review highlights recent advances in classical and genetic engineering improvement of yeasts to produce more antioxidant compounds or less beer aging substances and precursors. Therein, improvement targets, evaluation methods and development strategies of anti-staling brewer’s yeast are also discussed. Furthermore, hotspot and future trend of anti-staling yeast strain development are also proposed.

Key words:beer, brewer’s yeast, anti-staling, antioxidant, flavor stability, strain improvement