Scientists Unlock Key to Brewing New Lagers

Trees in Patagonia may hold the secret, new study suggests
By Gina Carey,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 29, 2024 8:00 AM CDT
Scientists Unlock Key to Brewing New Lagers
A Bavarian craft beer being poured.   (Krombacher Brauerei GmbH & Co./News Aktuell via AP Images/News Aktuell via AP Images)

Lagers have retained a consistent taste for hundreds of years, but a scientific breakthrough in one of the beer's key ingredients might usher in an era of new varieties. The three main elements needed to brew lagers are malt, hops, and yeast, notes the Washington Post. But lager yeast has primarily remained the same for hundreds of years (there are 86 strains, compared to the approximately 400 strains of ale yeast). "All the lager beers that we drink now come from a single event from a yeast generated 500 years ago," Francisco Cubillos of the University of Santiago-Chile, an author of the paper in PLOS Genetics, tells the Post. "That makes most of the lager beers quite similar." And that similarity is a huge deal, given that lagers account for 90% of commercial beer varieties, per a release at Phys.org.

The researchers successfully bred a hybrid yeast using one found in trees in South America's Patagonia region, then encouraged it to eat sugar during fermentation using a practice called experimental evolution, which involves nudging along the evolutionary process in a lab setting. Getting the hybrid yeast to eat enough sugar to produce the gases and alcohol needed to make lager took 250 evolutions over seven months, but the effort ultimately was successful. "I was so happy, and I was jumping around the lab," lead author Jennifer Molinet recalls. The new strains produced scents not associated with lagers, some sweet, others spicy and clovelike, signaling that their flavor profiles could differ in new and exciting ways.

How lager's original yeast strain came to be is a bit of a mystery in the beer world. In a fascinating read on its history, Good Beer Hunting writer Mark Dredge calls the original pairing "the microbial world's version of a lion and tiger breeding" (and without the help of test tubes, as is the case with the new Patagonian hybrid). Now Cubillos' lab will move onto the next stage of developing their discovery into experimental beer-making. "We need to catch up with 500 years of domestication," he tells the Post. "But we see it as an opportunity." (Bolivia's challenge: getting the world to drink coca-infused beer.)

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