The Science of Skunked Beer

erfnet writes "The Technical University of Munich, along with a German beer-maker, have kindly published a 'Comprehensive Sensomics Analysis of Hop-Derived Bitter Compounds During Storage of Beer' They determined 56 hop-derived sensometabolites which contribute to bitter taste during storage, increasing with time and temperature. If we had only had this information during our College days, we could have been even geekier! 'Duuuuude, it's not skunked, it's suffering from proton-catalyzed cyclization of trans-iso-a-acids.'"