Quantitative assay for characteristic compounds in wild ales

I plan on designing a quantitative assay to profile various wild ales (lambic, gueuze, flander's red and brown). I plan on testing ethyl acetate, acetic acid, and total volatile acids. I am also looking into additional compounds to add to the assay (depending on the ease/cost of creating a quantitative test for them). What are some characteristic compounds that you would like to see added? So far I have only looked into Isoamylacetate and a few phenols, but no sure-fire test methods yet...

Gas chromatography (or GC/MS if it is available) seem the obvious ways to go and you will find tons of literature that uses these techniques for investigating beer flavor and aroma.

I'd use preliminary research to answer the question i.e. run a bunch of chromatograms or look at the literature and see what you find in the beers of interest and how they vary. If you find (and you probably will) ethyl hexanoate, for example and find that it gives a hefty peak in some beers but not so much in others I'd add ethyl hex to the list.

I would use preliminary results from actually drinking some.

I will be using GC/MS to do QA/QC tests, but it has to be an easily reproduced assay unfortunately (school/research project restrictions). Will most likely be doing a fixed enzyme type assay with different enzyme concentrations and a ladder column. I realize this is pretty limiting but I'm hoping I can come up with a 4-5 compounds that are easy to test but still useful in a profile. I will start looking into ethyl hex. Thanks for the suggestion!

failbeams said:

.... I'm hoping I can come up with a 4-5 compounds that are easy to test but still useful in a profile.

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That sounds like a job for Principal Components Analysis.