fermentative pathways glycolysis cell buddingThis started as a spontaneous weekendproject of simply trying a beer extract kit for fun in 2003.

Thanks to initial failures the simple project quickly grew into a 3-year project (2003-2006) involving studying beer flavour chemistry, biochemistry and yeast biology in order to understand and predict the complex process behind the common beverage.

During the course of investigation the motivation changed from just understanding from just howto make good beer into understanding the regulatory systems of a yeast cell, and what a viable strategy for making a mathematical model out of this would be like. Lesson learnt was that reductionist modelling strategies common to physics, is not viable for complex systems. The regulatory systems can not be modelled from first principles without ending up with a chaotical dynamical system. In itself no surprise, but one possible solution seems to be to try to characterize the presumed evolutionary stable traits and add them as constraints in the model. The regulatory constraints replaces a chaotical dynamics system, where the exact path is unknown, with a statistical perspective where the exact path need not be determined in order to make predictions. The logic of flavour formation can be understood in terms of evolved survival mechanisms of yeast and thus the logic of life.

Not much of the details of this project are published on this site since the project is much older than this website. But a couple of easy to read articles written – in swedish – for the swedish homebrewers associations members magazine, are published here for reference for those interested.

Random project pictures