Scientists have created something new.
Lagers are boring. When you pop a can of lager beer, you taste the product of closely related strains of Saccharomyces pastorianus. Their genetic variety pales in comparison to the small but diverse group of yeasts used for making ale and wine, which pump out vastly different metabolic by-products and a wide range of flavors. In fact, lagers have looked and tasted much the same for hundreds of years because breeding strains with new brewing characteristics and flavors has proved difficult; the hybrids were effectively sterile. But that is about to change.
This good news harks back to the 15th-century origins of lagers. S. pastorianusappears to have been bred after an accidental cross of two other yeasts in a cool, dark cave in Bavaria when monks began “lagering,” or storing beer. In the 1980s scientists determined the identity of one original parent: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is the mother of all yeasts used in baking and brewing. The other remained unknown until 2011, when Diego Libkind, an Argentine microbiologist, identified Saccharomyces eubayanus in the forests of Patagonia as the missing link. Wild S. eubayanus was not well adapted for industrial brewing, but its discovery opened up the possibility of developing new yeast crosses. “Once eubayanus was discovered, things suddenly became very interesting,” says Brian Gibson, who studies brewing yeasts at the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland in Espoo.
