Fate of Fusarium Toxins during Brewing

Abstract

Some information is available about the fate of Fusarium toxins during the brewing process, but only little is known about the single processing steps in detail. In our study we produced beer from two different barley cultivars inoculated with three different Fusarium species, namely, Fusarium culmorum, Fusarium sporotrichioides, and Fusarium avenaceum, producing a wide range of mycotoxins such as type B trichothecenes, type A trichothecenes, and enniatins. By the use of multi-mycotoxin LC-MS/MS stable isotope dilution methods we were able to follow the fate of Fusarium toxins during the entire brewing process. In particular, the type B trichothecenes deoxynivalenol, 3-acetyldeoxynivalenol, and 15-acetyldeoxynivalenol showed similar behaviors. Between 35 and 52% of those toxins remained in the beer after filtration. The contents of the potentially hazardous deoxynivalenol-3-glucoside and the type A trichothecenes increased during mashing, but a rapid decrease of deoxynivalenol-3-glucoside content was found during the following steps of lautering and wort boiling. The concentration of enniatins greatly decreased with the discarding of spent grains or finally with the hot break. The results of our study show the retention of diverse Fusarium toxins during the brewing process and allow for assessing the food safety of beer regarding the monitored Fusarium mycotoxins.

Fusarium Mycotoxins Stability during the Malting and Brewing Processes

“…Boiling is the next stage and it is characterized by the enzyme inactivation, hops addition, isomerization of hop alfa acids, evaporation of water and volatile compounds (dimethyl sulphides, undesirable in beer), protein precipitation, sterilization, Maillard reactions, and flavour modulation [17]. Regarding the impact of wort boiling on mycotoxin content, the temperature in this process, (above 100 °C) and the average time of boiling (1 h) could cause a decrease in mycotoxin concentration [8,28]. This experience can be seen in the results of the present study, even in low concentrations.…”

Occurrence and preventive strategies to control mycotoxins in cereal‐based food

“…For instance, Habler et al. (2016) found that the DON levels in inoculated barley grains dropped by 51% to 70% after steeping, then increased by 150% to 160% after germination, and then ended with a reduction by 70% to 90% after kilning. However, there are samples that occasionally exhibit aberrant behavior, where DON and D3G levels increased significantly compared to original level of DON during malting (Jin et al., 2017).…”

“…The mycotoxin residues are water‐soluble and thermal‐stable, and thus can survive in both the fermentation and boiling steps. These residues may end up with partially transferring to the final beer product (Habler et al., 2016). In addition, the beer fermentation products have shown the capability to bind mycotoxins that may increase their change to stay in the beer (Campagnollo et al., 2015).…”

Anti-Contamination Strategies for Yeast Fermentations

“…Barley can be affected by a plant disease called Fusarium head blight, which is caused by the Fusarium species [49]. This disease damages the brewing industry through a negative impact on the barley germination rate and mycotoxin contamination [50,51]. High-quality barley can also be infected during malting.…”