Using some crazy new-wave, next-generation sequencing technology, scientists have recently traced the origins of the yeast that brewers use to make the most popular lager beer in the world to its roots in 15th Century Bavaria.
No surprise to some, of course, that today’s most popular beer came from Germany.

If you are not a beer drinker, however, you should that although the marketing might make it seem like there is a wide variety of beers, there are really only two base varieties of beer: ale and lager. So the first thing they had to do was determine the type of yeast is used in the most popular beer (obviously, because it is a lager).

“Brewers sometimes, even earlier than understanding that was the reason for fermentation, typically adopted practices that have been kind of conducive to passaging [yeast] strains from one batch of wort to a different,” explains study co-author Chris Hittinger. Wort, of course, incorporates uses the sugars fermented by the yeast ferments to supply the alcohol content and which in turn helps to keep the yeast cells alive.

The genetics professor in the Division of Botany on the College of Wisconsin-Madison goes on to say, “Brewers had classically outlined two main : the Saaz lineage, which isn’t used very a lot anymore at present, and the Frohberg lineage, which is the primary lineage of lager yeast that constitutes a lot of the strains which are used industrially right now.”

Hittinger also notes, “Lager yeasts did not just originate once. This unlikely marriage between two species, genetically as different from one another as humans and birds, happened at least twice.”

Finally Hittinger concludes, “Although these hybrids were different from the start, they also changed in some predictable ways during their domestication.”