The Ludwig Narziß Award 2025 goes to Mainburg

Leuven | This year's 16th International Trends in Brewing, which took place at KU Leuven in Belgium at the beginning of April 2025, provided a worthy setting for the presentation of the 11th Ludwig Narziß Award for Brewing Science. Once again, a project from the field of hop research received this EUR 2500 award for practical relevance for the brewing industry in front of around 300 attendees in the venerable Promotion Hall in the main building of KU Leuven, which is celebrating its 600th anniversary this year.

Mathis Geserer, Frank Peifer and Sandro Cocuzza, Simon H. Steiner, Hopfen, GmbH, Mainburg, were honored on site for the article “How the amount and timing of dry-hopping affects beer turbidity” from last year's BrewingScience issue July/August (77 (2024), no. 7/8, pp. 66–75). The co-authors Prof. Martin Krottenthaler from the Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Sciences in Weihenstephan and Korbinian Schmid, Freising, were not present.

This year's laudatory speech was given by EBC Executive Director John Brauer, who explained to those present the experiments on dosage quantity and dosage timing in dry hopping, as well as the influence on the turbidity of beer over the storage period. The team of authors was able to show that stable turbidity in beer can be better achieved if hops are added after primary fermentation and encounter yeast that is still active. The yeast takes hop particles down with it during sedimentation, which leads to a stable turbidity within the beer. Sedimentation also avoids the hop creep effect, as yeast cells that are still alive ferment the sugar produced by dry hopping. This also prevents an excessively high CO₂ content in the beer, and gushing.

This article was judged to be highly relevant to practice by the international expert reviewers and editorial board of the scientific journal BrewingScience, as a stable turbidity is expected for unfiltered beers, which represents a major technological challenge.