This may have been the most expensive, and technologically profound, taste-testing of all time. The first ever beef hamburger grown in a lab was put to the test at an event in London on Monday, and the result was overwhelmingly positive.

The burger patty, which cost a whopping $332,000 to produce, was funded by Google exec Sergey Brin. The hope was to provide a proof-of-concept for a sustainable source of meat that could be grown in a laboratory environment.

The 5-ounce patty debuted at Riverside Studios in West London, where an anxious crowd looked on to see the verdict. Two taste-testers were selected for that duty: Josh Schonwald, the  author of "The Taste of Tomorrow," and Hanni Rützler, an Austrian nutritional scientist.

"It's close to meat, but it's not as juicy," Rützler said. "I was expecting the texture to be more soft. The surface was surprisingly crunchy. I would have said if it was disgusting."

Neither of the judges had any problem with the meat, and said that it was comparable in taste to "real" beef hamburgers. The burger was made by Mark Post, whose lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands was commissioned to produce the burger.

"We are catering to beef eaters who want to eat beef in a sustainable way," Post said at the event in London today. "This is a technology that can be transferred to other animals as long as they have stem cells in their skeletal muscle. So it can be transferred to animals like fish, chicken, and lamb."

The patty was the fruit of five years worth of labor by Post and his colleagues. They accomplished the feat by nurturing for three months the growth of stem cells taken from a cow's shoulder. The type of stem cells they used, known as satellite cells, are responsible for muscle regeneration after injury.

Though the meat will inevitably raise concerns over the safety of ingesting such a substance, researchers seem confident that it may actually be a healthier alternative to the standard beef products we are used to. 

"We can see no reasons why this product would be less safe than conventional meat," said Sandra Stringer, senior microbiologist at the Institute of Food Research. "It is likely that it will be produced in sterile conditions and so could be much less prone to microbial contamination."

Researchers also stress that this new laboratory meat should not be confused with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The cells used are entirely from the cow and did not go through any significant alteration to their genetic structure.