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.
I've tried whiskies produced using the same process and aging from the same distillery, with the yeast being the only differing part of the process. Even after two rounds of distillation and eight years in a barrel, the difference in flavour was huge. You might be surprised.
I think it would almost be easier to just run the whole thing through HPLC and recreate it all manually. Because what are you going to do even if you do find the DNA? You have to first isolate it from the DNA of things like hops/barley/whatever else is in there, then you have to hope you have enough, at a high enough quality that you can multiply it with PCR, but then what? Do they somehow swap it into modern yeast? That's easier said than done.
But then, imagine they do somehow manage to fully recreate the exact same yeast from 162 years ago. They are still miles away from actually recreating the beer. Everything else in there also came from 162 year old variations of what we have today, so substituting in modern versions will come out just as different as if they just used different yeast. And if they wanted to try to recreate all of that as well somehow, they would need to not only account for the change from aging, but also reverse engineer what everything in there was like before it was acted on by the yeast.
And all of that somehow done by a beer company. I think that yeah, if they ever do come out with a product from this, it has to be more marketing than not.
I do think from strictly a science perspective, nothing to do with recreating the beer, isolating the old yeast DNA alone could have some interesting research possibilities though.
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u/Pugulishus 8h ago
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