Reduce agricultural methane? Let’s “hop” to it!

Join us for Second Sundays on zoom! We will be hosting Dr. Langdon Martin of Warren Wilson College. Log onto zoom, using the link in the sidebar, at 6pm EST on November 8th, 2020.

Hops are a key contributor to the flavors and aromas in beer. Some of the same molecules that contribute to the bitter taste in beer, the hop acids, are biologically active with interesting antimicrobial properties. Many of these molecules wind up in the spent yeast byproduct that forms during the beer-making process.

Spent craft yeast, which is protein-rich, has potential to be repurposed as a feed supplement for ruminants such as cattle. I will present results from initial in vitro studies that investigate this possibility. When bovine rumen fluid is incubated with spent craft yeast, methane production is inhibited, and the inhibition is comparable to that achieved with the commercial antimicrobial Monensin. Ongoing investigations involve how the methane-production process is affected by different concentrations of hop acids. This effect has the potential to improve agricultural feed efficiency and to reduce anthropogenic methane.

Langdon J. Martin, Ph.D. is a Professor of Chemistry at Warren Wilson College, where he teaches General and Organic Chemistry. His research interests include looking for environmentally beneficial uses for waste products.