foods Article Enlarging Knowledge on Lager Beer Volatile Metabolites Using Multidimensional Gas Chromatography Cátia Martins 1 , Tiago Brandão 2, Adelaide Almeida 3 and Sílvia M. Rocha 1,* 1 Departamento de Química & LAQV-REQUIMTE, Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal;
[email protected] 2 Super Bock Group, Rua do Mosteiro, 4465-703 Leça do Balio, Portugal;
[email protected] 3 Departamento de Biologia & CESAM, Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +351-234-401-524 Received: 30 July 2020; Accepted: 6 September 2020; Published: 11 September 2020 Abstract: Foodomics, emergent field of metabolomics, has been applied to study food system processes, and it may be useful to understand sensorial food properties, among others, through foods metabolites profiling. Thus, as beer volatile components represent the major contributors for beer overall and peculiar aroma properties, this work intends to perform an in-depth profiling of lager beer volatile metabolites and to generate new data that may contribute for molecules’ identification, by using multidimensional gas chromatography. A set of lager beers were used as case-study, and 329 volatile metabolites were determined, distributed over 8 chemical families: acids, alcohols, esters, monoterpenic compounds, norisoprenoids, sesquiterpenic compounds, sulfur compounds, and volatile phenols. From these, 96 compounds are reported for the first time in the lager beer volatile composition. Around half of them were common to all beers under study. Clustering analysis allowed a beer typing according to production system: macro- and microbrewer beers. Monoterpenic and sesquiterpenic compounds were the chemical families that showed wide range of chemical structures, which may contribute for the samples’ peculiar aroma characteristics.