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“Think of lions and tigers making a super-baby.” – Dr. Jan Steensels, Leuven Center for Microbiology
Yeast is one of beer’s primary ingredients along grain (mostly malted barley), hops and water. And while all are of these are pretty essential, yeast (a fungus) rules the roost.
And now an international team of scientists has discovered that some of the classic Belgian beers are fermented with a rare and unusual form of hybrid yeasts.
These yeasts combine the DNA of the traditional ale yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, with that of more stress-resistant wild yeasts such as Saccharomyces kudriavzevii and the researchers are suggesting that this discovery could lead to a brave new world of beer flavors.
“These yeasts are hybrids between two completely different species,” said Dr. Jan Steensels , a researcher at the Leuven Center for Microbiology, who coordinated the lab work of this study. “Think of lions and tigers making a super-baby.”
The team, from the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology and the University of Munich, has spent the last five years breaking down the makeup of different yeasts used in today’s production of beer, wine, bread and biofuels. And they were stunned by the discovery..
“It was a bit of a surprise for us,” said Dr. Brigida Gallone, the lead author on the paper that appeared in Nature Ecology and Evolution…
“In 2016, we reported that most industrial yeasts belong to, or arose from, the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the traditional baker’s and brewer’s yeast. We found that these industrial yeasts are quite different from their wild progenitors, with different subfamilies having adapted to beer, wine and bakery environments.”
“We also noticed that some of the yeasts that were isolated from ancient Belgian beer styles, like Gueuze and Trappist beers, are even more unusual and contained DNA of two different yeast species.”
The team, which consisted of researchers at VIB a life science institute Flanders, Belgium and scientists at the University of Munich, explained that genetic analysis of these yeasts was extremely difficult, “because none of the existing pipelines for DNA sequencing can deal with such mixed origins.”
But researchers found the roots of this ‘super yeast’ to be less surprising…
“It is no coincidence that the origin of today’s beer yeasts lies in Belgium and Germany, arguably the two countries that are most associated with the art of brewing,” said University of Munich’s Prof Mathias Hutzler.
