- Bugs and beer: most of us probably don’t see a connection beyond
shooing flies away from our pint glasses. But for a group of N.C. State
University scientists, bugs may hold the secret to making new,
surprising and delicious beers. That’s because yeasts – the
single-celled fungi responsible for converting sugar to alcohol in
fermented foods like beer and wine – are likely to be found on
arthropods like bees, wasps, hornets and beetles, said Anne Madden, a
part-time post-doctoral researcher at N.C. State.
If these yeasts could be isolated from bugs and successfully cultivated in the lab, she and NCSU professors Rob Dunn and John Sheppard mused, maybe they could be used to brew new kinds of beer.
