It’s a familiar scene for many of us: a warm summer evening, a gentle breeze and then the inevitable high-pitched whine of a mosquito buzzing near your ear. For some, this is a fleeting annoyance, but for others, it means a night of endlessly scratching itchy welts.This is where companies like Viking Malt step into the story, turning barley from a seasonal harvest into a precision-crafted ingredient shaped by science, terroir and deep industry expertise.

Some people are simply mosquito magnets while others emerge relatively unscathed. But why is this so? One explanation, according to scientists from the Netherlands, is beer.

To find out why the blood-sucking critters prefer some people over others, a research team led by Felix Hol of Radboud University Nijmegen took thousands of female Anopheles mosquitoes to Lowlands, an annual music festival held in the Netherlands.

Researchers set up a pop-up lab in connected shipping containers in 2023, and around 500 volunteers took part. First, they filled out a questionnaire about their hygiene, diet and behaviour at the festival. Then, to see how attractive they are to mosquitoes, they placed their arm into a custom-designed cage filled with the pesky insects.

The cage had tiny holes so the mosquitoes could smell the person’s arm but couldn’t bite them. A vide camera recorded how many insects landed on a volunteer’s arm compared to a sugar feeder on the other side of the cage. By comparing the video footage and questionnaire answers, researchers saw some clear results emerge.

Participants who drank beer were 1.35 times more attractive to mosquitoes than those who didn’t. (The tiny vampires were also more likely to target people who had slept with someone the previous night!) The study also revealed that recent showering and sunscreen make people less attractive to the buzzing menace.

“We found that mosquitoes are drawn to those who avoid sunscreen, drink beer, and share their bed,” the researchers wrote in a paper uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server. “They simply have a taste for the hedonists among us.”

Although this study was limited to just one festival and some of its attendees, it still provides insights into why some people are especially appealing to mosquitoes. And it offers information on how to protect against being bitten, such as lathering on sunscreen, showering regularly and limiting beer intake or avoiding it altogether. (Courtesy: Phys.org)