Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
OK, everybody enjoys a good beer, right? I'm sure you're no exception.
But tell me, last time you treated yourself to a fine restaurant,
did you get a bottle of wine or did you get some beer?
I guess you got the wine.
You see, I come from France, a holy grail of wine,
but I decided to move to Belgium
because I find beer so much more exciting than wine,
and not because it's twice as old as wine, but really because it's twice as modern.
And the intention today is to convince you of this very objective fact
by taking you on a journey of taste,
from the craft renaissance to beyond craft,
to cracking the code of flavor with a generation of hypertasters.
So, let's get going.
Craft is back.
You see, we are all here in an old brewery that had to shut down and leave town
[as] a victim of a faceless and tasteless industrial revolution.
But today, craft is back, breweries are back in Brussels,
back in Paris, back in London.
How did this happen?
Well, it's like making mayonnaise.
You have all the ingredients and, at some point, it just clicks.
Here is the same.
At some point, people start to realize that they are what they drink,
and maybe they don't want to be tasteless
and maybe they don't want to be faceless either.
Maybe they want more meaning to their beer,
maybe they want more fun to their beer,
and certainly they want more taste to their beer,
and that's what craft is about.
I'd like to talk about craft in three main points,
and the first is this why-not mindset, this abundant creativity,
because, you see, industrial brewers take a lot of pride
bringing the same beer over and over and over again
for 50 years, for 100 years,
but craft brewers take their pride in brewing 20, 30 new different beers
every single year.
A brewer's like a good cook, you know.
They are not afraid of using crazy ingredients
like tonka beans from Amazonia or chipotle chili from Mexico,
or cocoa nibs, or coffee beans, or even flowers.
They're not afraid of failing, as long as they fail better,
and they're not afraid of creating tastes that might not please everybody.
The second point is: sharing is learning, and the notion of collaboration.
This is a craft renaissance,
so brewers travel the world and share practices.
We had the chance on the beer project to brew with colleagues in Brazil,
in Canada, in the Netherlands, in Norway
and now we're also inviting brewers from the rest of the world
to come with us in Brussels, have fun, share practices
and think about taste together.
Very recently, a British brewery decided to share online
215 of its recipes, open-source,
because, you see, industrial brewers cherish the notion of copyright,
but craft brewers do "copyleft."
They want to be challenged and stimulated.
It's collaboration with you guys too.
We start to see more crowdfunding happening,
people supporting the local breweries,
but we also start to see crowdsourcing,
people having a voice in the selection of taste.
And, with more sophistication coming in the future,
with people, beer lovers, being more knowledgeable about beer,
we'll see crowdsourcing even at the earlier stage of beer creation.
My third point is: more is less, and the notion of sustainability.
You see, behind me is the first beer made of recycled bread,
the first beer made of food waste.
We were able to recycle, last year, ten tons of bread with this project,
and it worked so well that some colleagues in London decided to call us
and say, you know, "Could you share some of your process with us?
Because we'd like to do the same beer in London."
And we had a few Skype conversations, and we went to London,
and now it's happening: you also have a bread beer in London.
And I'm trying to build on our process,
so we might actually learn from them and learn from our original idea as well.
And if you're interested in circular economy,
you might want to know that this bread here in the picture
is made of beer, itself made of bread.
So, if it makes you feel dizzy, that's okay,
but wait until you try the beer.
All of this leads to where?
It leads to the exploration of taste,
to more expression, to more explosion, to more balance.
But to appreciate taste, you have to understand how it works.
So, let's do a small exercise here.
It's Beer 101.
I leave all the crazy ingredients aside,
all the tonka beans and coffee beans aside.
So, we go back to basics:
from left to right, you have the water, the barley malt, the hops and the yeast.
And let's try to peel beer like an onion,
see what's behind it and zoom inside a beer.
So, we'll focus on the hops first and let's see what's behind the hops,
and it's a whole spectrum of flavor available.
You see, for too long,
traditional brewers were really constraining hops
into bringing bitterness to their beer,
or maybe bringing grassy and herbal notes,
but it's much more than that.
You can see, you can get a whole range of flavors.
You can go evergreen, spicy, floral, fruity, citrusy.
There is more than that again.
You have more than 100 varieties of hop to play with,
and let's pick one: let's pick cascade hops for instance
and zoom inside cascade.
If you look at the graph, it should be citrus notes,
but it's more than citrus.
You have also sweet fruits and redberries.
If you look at this, you can actually notice two different sets of colors:
deep blue and light blue.
The light blue is about traditional brewing, traditional hopping,
during the boiling phase.
So, the deep blue is dry-hopping,
so trying to use the hops at a cooler temperature later on.
And it creates new flavors,
like maybe the woody notes and the crème caramel,
but also accentuates flavors, like the sweet fruits and the redberries.
Understanding every single ingredient to its very bare nature
and then being able to assemble all those ingredients into a Korean puzzle,
into a nice, tasty symphony, is the job of the brewer.
And, after a lot of focus on the hops,
there will be the same amount of work on the yeast.
Actually, we'll see wine yeast playing with beer yeast
and trying to create new flavor.
And we'll have very blurry lines
between what's wine, what's cider and what's beer in the future.
So, are we there yet?
Of course not, of course it's just the tip of the iceberg.
And, you know, this man here might look a little bit funny to you,
but he spends his days at the University of Oxford,
looking at the association between taste and sound.
And he proved that there was a direct connection
between high-frequency rhythm and a heightened sense of sweetness,
and low-frequency rhythm and a heightened sense of bitterness.
So, what it means is that you might be drinking
what's essencially the same beer, let's say one of mine,
and, if you're listening to electro music or jazz music,
you will have two different tasting experiences.
You see, that's the future of beer, I think.
It's not just beer in isolation, not just beer to its finest detail.
It will be beer in its context.
And maybe you already witnessed that yourself.
Maybe one day you had a beer at the beach, and then, a couple of months later,
you had the same beer in your living room, at night,
and I guess it didn't taste quite the same.
Well, this is the idea.
The idea is to look at beer in the context,
think about music pairing, but also color pairing.
maybe the association between beer and the temperature of the room,
to get into a 360 experience of taste.
And this will not just be for crazy brewers or crazy scientists.
It will be for everybody:
for you, for your kids and for your grandkids.
You see, in this room, we have about 300 supertasters.
You might not know you're one,
but, if you know the difference between peach and apricots very easily,
or between raspberries and cranberries, you might be one.
Actually, if you're a woman,
you have a natural advantage to be a supertaster.
If you come from Asia or if you come Africa,
you also have a natural advantage to be a supertaster.
So, what I mean is that we already identified the gene
responsible for supertasting abilities,
and, if we did so, it's easy to imagine, with CRISPR technology,
that tomorrow we'll create a generation of hypertasters,
people with the ability to find the redberries, and the sweet fruits
and the cascade hop.
People will be able to understand the connection
between the beer and the music that's playing,
and the room light, and the temperature of the room.
People will be able to understand taste much better
than professional brewers or scientists know today.
People will be able to match beers with the right environment
and maximize their tasting experience,
again, getting this 360 experience of taste
and moving from real beer to amplified beer.
Well, flavor is also available for people who are not hypertasters,
for you and me,
but, if you don't want to look too stupid in front of your kids,
talking about beer, talking about whiskey, wine, food and taste in general,
I suggest you start your journey of taste rather soon,
maybe even tonight.
The day is ending.
I feel by now your craving for beer
and, once you have one, I'd like you to pause for one second.
I'd like you to look at it and look at the color.
It's not just blond or black.
If it's blond, is it pale blond? Is it golden blond?
Is it amber blond?
And then, what kind of perfume does it wear?
Is it citrusy? Do you have some grapefruit notes coming?
Do you have some woody notes coming as well?
And then, get a mouthful sip and see what's happening in your mouth.
What was the intention of the brewer when he made this beer for you?
What kind of memories does it bring back,
and what kind of places it makes you go to?
See, because beer is the shortest way to travel very far,
and once you're on this journey of taste, there's no way back.
So, I just wish you happy travels, and thank you very much.
(Applause)