The hop specialist BarthHaas has awarded Dr Nils Rettberg and Florian Schrickel, scientists at the Research Institute for Raw Materials and Beverage Analysis at VLB Berlin, with its BarthHaas Grants 2023 award. This year's other winners are Guillaume Willemart and Prof Sonia Collin, who conduct research at the Louvain Institute of Biomolecular Science and Technology (LIBST) at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

The team led by Rettberg and Schrickel is investigating how the quality and stability of intensively hopped beers can be improved using high-pressure processes for non-thermal pasteurisation. Willemart and Collin are investigating how the enzymatic activities of hops and spices, which are added to the beer during fermentation by hopping, affect the stability of the product.

BarthHaas is supporting the research work with prize money of 10,000 euros each. The awards ceremony took place on 29 November at BrauBeviale in Nuremberg.
Dr Christina Schönberger, Head of the Brewing Solutions Team at BarthHaas, congratulated the award winners on their promising research concepts. "The projects we have supported have repeatedly produced astonishing and valuable findings for us," Schönberger said happily. "Contact with the scientists is therefore always a benefit for BarthHaas too."

The BarthHaas Grants have been funding pioneering scientific projects in hop research at colleges, universities and research institutions every year since 2007. In many cases, they have served as start-up funding: many successful projects have attracted widespread attention and could be continued with public funding, according to the founders.

The winners of the BarthHaas Grant 2023, in the centre: Florian Schrickel and Dr Nils Rettberg from the VLB Berlin.