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They should use trace dna scraped off Clochafarmore to make up the missing pieces. Can't get more irish than guinness brewed with the blood of Cú Chulainn
Well we know the entire genome sequence of modern yeast strains. Presumably this old strain is very similar. If we only get segments of it, we would just fill in the missing pieces with a modern genome.
Listen, Loverboy had a hit song called Elephant and Pig DNA Just Won't Splice. I'm assuming they have something in the vault for Guinness and Frog DNA.
Why would DNA help with the recipe? DNA from the yeast? I doubt it’s preserved. Even if it is, that’s not a recipe. The genetic code doesn’t tell you how long they boiled the mash.
Edit: Metaphorical DNA, not literal.
Edit: Maybe they’d find some rat DNA, validating the myth that Guinness’ signature taste was from rats that fell into the fermentation chambers. A story immortalized in the Dropkick Murphys song “good rats”
https://youtu.be/dnjs1gYf27w?is=QygDjBmx8t-aBfQp
Guinness original is an gigantic ancient living organism living deep in the primordial caves under Dublin. After over 300 years of draining it for its juices it’s withered away to a shallow husk of its former self, begging for the seeet release of death its immortal form will not grant it. Hopefully this dna of it before the mass extractions began will rejuvenate it so we can continue to tap it’s delicious spoils for generations to come.
The actual recipes are recorded but in ye olde days brewerys just used whatever yeast was in the environment these change and modern laws prevent this so the plan is to sequence the DNA and try find as close a match as possible and brew it see what happens so no its not helping the "recipe" but yno urself
We have pretty good 19th century brewing records, often the problem is getting the malt right. Also earlier 19th century beer didn't have pure yeast strains which makes them incredibly hard to recreate faithfully.
quantative pcr can discover how much and which dna is present in a sample which can be transcribed to the amount and which ingredients are used. The malts, hops and yeasts contain DNA. It doesn't uncover the exact recipe like mashing temps/times and boiling time, but gives an excellent guess at the ingredients and the amount used.
Wow, that's some horrendous title writing. Metaphorical DNA is just such a weird reach. There's got to be a way to say that that doesn't make the author sound like they don't know what DNA is.
We use yeast recovered from one batch to seed the next batch. So every day a new generation of yeast would be used. The yeast evolves over time through natural selection and therefore changes slowly over time. It is also possible that some time there were an infection from another yeast that took over and we just did not notice.
Modern production methods try to reduce the evolution in the microbes we use. The yeast from one batch will get divided into tiny samples that each get frozen. They can then be thawed one at a time and revived in the lab to be used for brewing for an entire month. This means the same generation of yeast can be used to brew the beer for years instead of just a single day.
+1 to this comment. In addition, advancement in all aspects of brewing has led to stricter standards of malting grain and hop processing. Much less our understanding of water chemistry. It's difficult to get a known recipe to perform to flavor profiles in any two (non macro) breweries, much less understand a recipe written for different standards of ingredients hundreds of years ago. It's part of the fun trying to suss it out!
honestly, beer's probably one of the better sectors for that. I know we like to treat germ theory like this watershed where everything before it is death - but for brewing, you need to have some idea of what works and what doesn't, because it's the difference between alcohol and vinegar. It's probably more ritual than understanding, but it works.
Plus the base recipe for beer is so simple that they're really just looking to see how ancient hops/grain/yeast differed from modern. or what modern varieties are closest to what was used at the time.
before germ theory fermentation was pure vibes, like medieval bakers who lost their starter or moved to a new area and had none, would just make dough in a bunch of small bowls and leave them out until one or more of them happened to get enough wild yeast, and that was the starter
Guinness(1759) is after the Reinheitsgebot in 1516, so I’d guess they ran off a similar standards of practice. Gruit had fallen out of favor by then and hops became the main bittering/flavoring addition.
They’d be using things like coolships to bring the boiled wort down to blood temp range before transferring into another vessel to ferment. Allowing local wild yeasts to inoculate the beer. That coolship practice was common until we had practical refrigeration and heat exchangers. The practice continues today though, used by hobbyists and commercially to make a style called California Common or steam beer. Popularized by Anchor Steam brewing and made all the way into today.
It would be absolutely nothing like today's draught Guinness.
Diageo have an archive at St. James Gate so they could definitely dig out the recipe, but they'd not make it at their facility as it would contain wild yeasts they wouldn't want contaminating the place.
The yeast is the magic sauce. The only reason fermentation exists is because of it. Over time, yeasts change from selective culturing similar to dogs.
Mostly, it's pendantic, probably marketing bullshit as far as flavors go, but rates do change, so if there's an OG recipie, the speed at which the yeast converts sugars to alcohol could be different, and so could the brew if using modern yeast on an old recipie
Good point. I can’t remember if the brewing process generally kills all the yeast, but might spores survive? It seems like trying to culture yeast from the bottles would be way more efficient than looking at any recovered DNA
Fermentation kills some yeast but not all of it. If you take the sediment from the bottom of a beer and incubate it, you can get a colony of yeast with the same characteristics of the original brew. This only works with relatively fresh beers, however. After 162 years I doubt any are still alive.
After 162 years no normally no yeast would survive but fascinatingly yeast can enter a hibernation state when kept at 32-50 degrees. Dormant yeast can survive for a very long time. I know some yeasts have successfully been revived from much older sources. Considering it was likely cold enough where they discovered it, and that it’s bottle-conditioned rather than pasteurized due to its age. It’s not completely impossible living samples could be obtained.
After 162 years no normally no yeast would survive
So. My brain took this, put a dark delivery on it, and made it the opening line of a trailer for a satiracal horror movie à la The Stuff where people resurrect a dormant beer yeast and it becomes the most popular beer in the world even as it survives digestion and begins infecting its drinkers. People ferment inside their own bodies, bursting into floods of man beer when killed.
I can’t remember if the brewing process generally kills all the yeast
You brew before you ferment. The brewing is what breaks down the grain into sugars that the yeast can actually access.
You are correct that brewing kills stuff off, which is one of the reasons people historically drank beer. They didn't know the whys and the hows of beer being safer to drink than water but they knew it was better to have a mug than drink from the local pond.
The brewing process was killing off all the nasty stuff and the yeast added afterwards turning the sugar into alcohol made it an inhospitable environment for most germs after the fact.
Yeah yeast, grains, even hops dna would be helpful for a clearer understanding. You wouldn’t need it to reconstruct the recipe. Society has the og Guinness mash grain bills and whatnot. What’s missing is the fine details. Things they just didn’t have the tech to fuss about in the 1870s that brewers worry about today.
It would be interesting to sample and find a difference in grain modification over 150 years. Maybe find they had higher dextrins and unfermentable sugars in the finished products than what’s acceptable in the modern day. (Happens from too high a strike temp for steeping the grain or an inconsistent mash tun heater. Neutralizing the enzymes that cleave starches into usable sugars)
Or with yeast result in finding the pre-refrigeration yeast cultures had a diverse mixed colony. What gave it that sour hint that society liked/likes in the beer by itself, with less steps. Reproduced nowadays via back adding old beer into the new batch. Places that culture yeast for the industry like white labs, wyeast, lavlin, etc love new strains to put into their yeast banks.
Hops would be interesting along a lineage tree. To see how far they’ve changed from landrace to the current cross breeds of hops, and its place along it.
Organoleptically, they’ve had taste qa for ever though so I’d be surprised if it drifted away far from year to year. They’ve also had brew logs and purchasing logs to show ingredients used. They know how to repeat a recipe so I’m not quite a believer in them searching for a “mystery” in regards to ingredients. Most strongly, a clarity on a snapshot in agriculture/brewing history.
The hops have DNA, the yeast has DNA, the barley has DNA. Just like a 23 and me test, they can tell what specific type of ingredient they were, and possibility the ratios
The proteins are probably of more interest for that specific analysis given proteins typically last longer and there's way more protein in food than DNA. The DNA would be most useful for determining the exact yeast strain but that's pretty unlikely to work given DNA degrades pretty quickly.
Isinglass (dry swim bladder protein) was used as a fining agent.
You can do the same with gelatin, but isinglass had the helpful point that it was a waste product from nearby fish processing, and doesn't require all the cooking and processing required to make regular food-grade gelatin.
Basically, any little floaty bits (yeast, grain mash, etc) stick together when you add fining agents to your beer, wine, cider or any fermented alcohol, and they're heavy so they sink out, making the beer clear and the mouth-feel & taste less muddy.
I've actually got some fining in my fridge right now, I'll see if I can get a good picture.
Edit: don't know if this'll come out well through reddit's hosting, but the bottle is cloudy cos it's cold, and its warm and humid here today. Instant frostiness. Otherwise, the liquid is clear, and all the sediment from brewing is formed into a loose lump at the bottom there with a very small amount of gelatin added.
Sooo… they’re going to maybe find out the species of grain and yeast? What about the other 99% of the process? If just the DNA analysis counts as the “recipe”, they should make a loaf of bread with those two ingredients and say “yeah this is what Guinness was like in 1864.
What's the joke here? What does a "disturbance in the force" mean, and how does that relate to finding an old bottle of Guinness? Yes, I know about Star Wars, but this is poorly thought through like so many "jokes" on Reddit by 15 year olds who don't actually know what a joke or a pun or irony even is. Sad.
The joke is the implied gravity of such a discovery to Irish people. Just because you don't like or get a joke doesn't mean you have to make an obnoxious, insulting comment about it
Even excluding the fact that yeast, hops, and barley varieties have changed over time, the recipes have changed quite a few times since the 18th century. The current recipe is only from the 1950s.
When we ate dinner at the Ed Sullivan Theater years ago, they had a beer called Flag Porter whose claim to fame was that the yeast was retrieved from a sunken ship. We also met Paul Shaffer from the Letterman show who was somehow involved in the restaurant.
Researched and devised by Dr Keith Thomas at the Brewers’ Laboratory (Brewlab) in London, Flag Porter is a historical recreation of a porter beer from the 19th century. In 1988 deep-sea divers from the City of London Polytechnic were investigating the wreck of a ship that had sunk in the English Channel in 1825. The divers found bottles of porter onboard the wreck, brought several to the surface, and gave them to Dr Thomas, who found that although the beer had been contaminated by seawater and was undrinkable, some original yeast was still alive inside the bottles. He was able to isolate a few living yeast cells from one bottle and culture them in his laboratory until he had a sufficient amount of yeast to make a batch of beer. The first brew took place in 1988 at the Pitfield Brewery in Hoxton, London, since when the beer has been brewed regularly, mostly for sale in the United States. https://www.beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/5JrFR84NZR
DNA? Yeast isn't any mystery to the Guinness owners and heritage, it's been tracked for a long time.
If anything you'll be able to do some interesting analysis on how this beer changed over 160 years... pH, specific gravity, component breakdowns of acids, esters, phenols etc in presence. Extra Stout is a hell of a beer, this would have been delicious back in 1860.
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