The 7th International Multidisciplinary Conference for Young Researchers (MCYR 2026) brought together young scientists from around the world to share their research, exchange ideas, and explore innovative solutions to global challenges. As part of the conference, the MCYR 2026 Blog Competition encouraged participants to communicate their research in creative and accessible ways.
“From the Hop Field to the Beer Glass” by Jaroslav Přikryl was selected as the winning entry for the competition topic “AgriSci-UA — Science Without Borders: Connecting Knowledge, Agriculture and People”.
Enjoy reading!
Winning blog by Jaroslav Přikryl
A hop variety begins in the field, but its aroma story continues long after harvest.
A raw onion does not smell like a fried one. Coffee beans change dramatically when they are roasted. Bread dough smells nothing like a freshly baked loaf.
We experience it every day: heat does more than make food hot. It changes aroma.
Beer is no exception.
But before beer reaches a glass, its story begins much earlier – with a plant growing in a field.
Hops are an agricultural crop, and different hop varieties carry different mixtures of volatile aroma compounds. These mixtures give each variety its own chemical fingerprint and help create the citrus, floral, herbal, resinous or fruity characters associated with hops.
That diversity gives growers, researchers and brewers a broad aromatic palette to work with.
But there is a catch.
The aroma of a hop variety is not necessarily the aroma that ends up in the beer.
Something happens between the crop and the glass.
Aroma does not just disappear
Hop aroma comes largely from hundreds of volatile compounds known as essential oils. Because they are volatile, it is tempting to imagine brewing mainly as a process of loss: heat is applied, some aroma escapes, and whatever survives makes its way into the beer.
But that is only part of the story.
When we exposed different hop varieties to controlled heating, their chemical fingerprints changed. More importantly, they did not all change in the same way.
This matters because the value of a crop does not end at harvest. Its chemistry continues to interact with the way it is processed.
This led us to ask a simpler question: what does heat do to the individual molecules behind hop aroma?
We separated the problem into its basic building blocks and heated individual aroma compounds under controlled conditions. Some hardly changed. Others began forming new compounds.
And as we investigated more molecules, something unexpected emerged.
From varieties to a chemical network
At first, we expected relatively simple transformations: one molecule changes and produces another.
Instead, the chemistry began to resemble a network.
Different starting molecules could form the same product. A transformation product could become the starting point for another reaction. Some compounds appeared as crossroads connecting several pathways.
Imagine a food-production chain. The qualities of a crop at harvest matter, but so does everything that happens afterwards. Different starting points can lead towards similar outcomes, while small differences may send the process in another direction.
Hop aroma appeared to behave in a similar way. The chemical fingerprint of a hop variety may therefore not be a fixed recipe for the aroma of the final beer.
It may be only the starting point.
What happens when the molecules meet?
Our simplified experiments still had one important limitation.
In nature, aroma molecules are never alone.
A hop contains many aroma compounds at the same time. So, after studying them separately, we combined 25 selected hop essential-oil compounds into one mixture and exposed them to heat together.
Then came perhaps the most intriguing result:
8 new transformation products appeared – none had been observed when the selected compounds were heated individually.
Simply bringing the molecules together revealed chemistry that studying them one by one had not.
We do not yet know exactly how all these interactions occur. But the result shows why connecting agricultural knowledge with processing science matters. Knowing what a crop contains is valuable; knowing what those compounds may become during processing can tell us even more.
Connecting the field, the laboratory and the glass
Brewing is far more complicated than our controlled laboratory experiments. Fermentation, other raw materials and processing conditions add further layers to the final aroma. We are still far from predicting exactly how a particular hop variety will shape the finished beer.
But understanding these transformations can help connect different parts of the same food system: the hop variety selected in the field, the chemistry studied in the laboratory and the decisions made during brewing.
Agricultural diversity becomes more useful when we understand not only what different crops contain, but also how their unique properties behave on the journey towards the foods and drinks people actually consume.
The next time you smell citrus, flowers, herbs or fruit rising from a glass of beer, remember that the story of that aroma started long before the bottle was opened.
It began with a plant in a field.
And the chemistry continued from there.
