Scientists Discovered the "Missing Link" of Beer Brewing

Mystery solved! Scientists have discovered the "missing link" in beer brewing. Ladies and gents, take a good look at the orange-colored galls on the beech tree to your left: they were found to harbor the specific strain of yeast that makes lager beer possible.

How did lager beer come to be? After pondering the question for decades, scientists have found that an elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the crisp-tasting German beer 600 years ago.

It took a five-year search around the world before a scientific team discovered, identified and named the organism, a species of wild yeast called Saccharomyces eubayanus that lives on beech trees.

"We knew it had to be out there somewhere," said Chris Todd Hittinger, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a coauthor of the report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

I assume the scientists appropriately celebrated their discovery with a few pints: Link (Photo: Diego Libkind)

Previously on Neatorama: Neatolicious Fun Facts: Beer


There is one big problem with the article - its unerstanding of lager and lagering. Bottom fermented beers or lagers did not emerge in the 1400s more like 1800s. Fermenting in cool cave does not lager make. See http://www.germanbeerinstitute.com/history.html for information showing that it was ale (top fermented beer) in Germany until much later. Fermentation was not understood until Pasteur.
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And while we are on the subject of false assumptions: Just because the yeast was first discovered in South America, does not mean it originated there.
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