I stumbled upon this news item from last December that appeard in Science News, the Weekly News Magazine of Science. The article, by Aimee Cunningham, entitled A Skunk Walks into a Bar . . . Fighting Beer’s Fouler Flavors was a pretty good overview of the history of identifying and codifying the individual flavor compounds found in beer. Some of the information is necessarily simplified but it still contains a lot of worthwhile and interesting information.