The weekly SciAm Podcast Science Talk had an interview with UCDavis beer science professor Charles Bamforth. The interview was mostly concerned with Bamforth’s 2003 book on beer and science. Many of the things discussed on the program are common knowledge for most beer geeks but it’s still fun to have science media cover some part of the beer world.

As explained in this interview, beer is a much more complex beverage than wine. In North America, many people seem to associate wine with sophistication and beer with college drinking. The interview does fairly little to debunk these associations but does give some idea of how interesting beer can be from a scientific perspective.