Free Republic

While you might have cracked open a cold one to enjoy Saturday’s preseason football game, the U.S. is experiencing a shortage of carbon dioxide, which produces all that fizz and bubbly in the beer. Issues with contamination and a train line strike have impacted the carbon dioxide supply around the country. Many local breweries said they're monitoring the situation, thankful that their supplies haven’t fizzled out just yet. While some breweries are worried about production, others are turning to greener methods to help. Lone Oak Farm Brewing Company in Olney, Maryland, is one business using alternative methods to prevent products...

It can take just 90 seconds and a rubber band. Curious cooks have begun hacking carbonators, the soda-making machines that are proliferating in American home kitchens. Most buyers are happy to use them for their intended purpose: turning tap water into sparkling water. But off-label, they have been used to make herb-infused sparkling wine, newfangled sangria, heady cocktails and nonalcoholic — but intoxicatingly delicious — sodas. Recently, in a storefront laboratory in Chinatown, Piper Kristensen, a bartender and occasional lab assistant who works for the avant-garde bar Booker and Dax in the East Village, studied a SodaStream Penguin. It had...

Protein splits carbon dioxide to give fizz its flavor The light, sparkly fizz of champagne owes its taste to the tongue’s sense of sour. New studies in mice reveal how the tongue tastes carbonation, solving an old puzzle of why some mountain climbers get the “champagne blues.” Tasting fizz begins with a special protein that’s tethered to sour-sensing taste cells on the tongue, researchers report in the Oct. 16 Science. This protein, the enzyme carbonic anhydrase 4, splits carbon dioxide into bicarbonate ions and free protons, which stimulate the sour-sensing cells. Scientists have long thought that the taste of carbonated...