Genetic determinism: beer edition
From the Sun, via the Herald “A brewery is promising the best beer of your life thanks to a personalised test using your DNA.”
The main detail mentioned (or alluded to) is testing for sensitivity to bitter tastes, where there’s a common single genetic variant with a big effect. Sensitivity to bitter tastes has some relationship to whether you like bitter tastes or not, and that presumably has some effect on what sort of beer you like. If you had to make beer recommendations for someone using only a saliva sample, you’d probably do better than chance if you used the genetic information.
But, actually, if you want to know whether someone likes a particular flavour of beer it’s a lot easier and more reliable to give them a taste and see what they say. After all, many of us find our tastes in beer change over time, although our genome stays just the same. And it sounds as though that’s really what is going on, with “customers are invited in for a one-to-one session with Meantime Brewery’s MasterBrewer, who will work to create the tastiest brew around.”
The first person to get a uniquely personalised genetic beer was the brewer himself:
And his pale ale has been a hit.
Following the successful test brew, his recipe will soon be available as a seasonal brew from The Meantime Tasting Rooms in Greenwich.
Where he’s not expecting anyone else to appreciate it?
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »