Saw this on a coaster at Triumph brewing at Philly.
The waitress thought: “Umm… perhaps a beer molecule? I dunno” :dubious:
Ethyl alcohol.
Not even close.
I don’t know what it is though. I originally thought caffeine, but its not.
No it’s not. I can’t identify the molecule, but it’s certainly not ethanol.
The waitress’ answer: beer is ethyl alcohol (among other things), and ethyl alcohol is just simply CH3COOH
I suspected caffeine too, turned out it wasn’t.
It is Humulone, one of the chemicals that give hops their bitter taste.
And thanks for making me waste my time this morning - I can’t help myself 
Did you count the number of each element, then searched for that formula?
No, simpler than that. I searched Google images for “beer molecule structure” - it was in the last row on the first page.
Awesome, thanks! Now I can put one more nagging question in my head to rest. I tried the Google images thing too, guess I wasn’t patient enough to go till the last row.
That’s a really shoddily drawn structure. Not only is there a missing oxygen atom (which should be attached to the first carbon attached to the “2 o’clock position” of the ring) and a missing double bond in the cyclohexene ring, but it’s a weird hybrid of different methods of drawing. Two of the side chains are drawn as skeletal structures but one is (partially) drawn out with all the atoms marked. (Apart from the ones they missed out).
This is what it ought to look like.
Actually it probably exhibits keto-enol tautomerism, so it could be drawn with just one double bond in the ring and a ketone group instead of the hydroxyl (OH) group, as in mozchron’s link. The one on the beermat is definitely wrong, though.
Couple of errors in the beer guys structure which would prevent searching by molecular formula. They’re close enough with it though.
Going through ‘Hops’ on wikipedia got there too. It wasn’t as pretty as your search though.
I love this place. . .
What’s the weird dashed line connecting the hydoxide on the bottom right?
it goes into the page, the triangle comes out from the page.