AUCKLAND, New Zealand. History tells us how Bavarians innovated what now makes up 94 per cent of the world’s beer market after noticing how beer stored in caves over the winter continued to ferment, creating a lighter and smoother drop.
Less clear, however is the origins of the two yeast species, S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus, which make up the lager hybrid strains.
Now, US scientists have used next-generation sequencing to assemble a high-quality genome of S. eubayanus, finding that it’s taken a different evolutionary path to S. cerevisiae.
According to study author Chris Todd Hittinger, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the unlikely marriage between these lager yeasts – although as different from each other as humans and birds – happened at least twice during their domestication.
With the findings clarifying origins of the major lineages of the hybrid yeasts used to brew lagers, science has given us a roadmap for future research in the domestication of lager yeasts. Let’s drink to that.
