Otimização da metodologia para quantificação de óleo essencial de Humulus lupulus de diferentes cultivares brasileiras

Abstract

Hops are often considered the main essence of beer, but few know it, nor know its potential. The complex process of brewing beer is something extremely impacting in its quality, however, the hops can be considered a main raw material, directly responsible for the flavor and the other organoleptic aspects of this fermented drink. The increase in both the agricultural production of hops and the production of craft beer, which originates from hops with greater qualities, leads to a tendency to elaborate and improve the techniques involved in processing. In a glimpse of this trend, the present work proposed to seek an optimization of the application for extraction and quantification of essential oil in the hops, chasing the goal of optimization the methodology used for extraction e quantification of hops’ essential oil to reduce costs with the analysis of this material. The amount of this essential oils is directly linked to defining its quality, as well as the way it is processed in beer. For this, 2 different equipments were used for the hidrodestilation of hops, the Clevenger and the Pharmacopeic. Using different masses of plants, different extraction times with different hop cultivars, it was possible to obtain essential oils of Brazilian hops, produced in the state of São Paulo, which denoted an average variation of refractive indices from 1.4690 to 1.4823 and 74.17 to 76.67 of nD, respectively. For the relative density, values ranging from 0.789 to 0.836 were captured. Analyzing the CG/MS of the cultivars it was possible no notice the chemical composition of the extracted essential oil in different times. Was possible to visualize in this composition, high contents of Myrcene and Farnesene. After the experiments it was possible to identify that as different varieties and larger amounts of vegetal mass are the main impact factors in the methodologies of extractions, both for the Clevenger equipment and the Pharmacopeic.