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.
Probably not detected with help of DNA. But mass spectometry can identify and quantify chemical compounds aswell.
But beer generally consists of water, malts, hops and yeast. Maybe they can recover the water profile with MS, but idk if the technique would be sensitive enough. Maybe a chemist here can fill me in?
Thank you for using Gemini to answer my question and posting the response here.
qPCR does estimate starting quantities from research samples based on amplification curves. This data would be useless for reverse engineering a literal recipe and starting quantities of the beer components. What you would have suggested instead is rtPCR or reverse transcriptase PCR which would generate a cDNA library of transcripts present. This could be sent for sequencing to identify hop varieties, yeast strains, or grain types.
As someone else suggested, chemical or proteomic analysis would get us closer to starting quantity types data.
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.
In this case, I’d be willing to bet the process isn’t the thing that’s unknown. Guinness knows how they’ve been brewing beer for the past umpteen however years, what they don’t know is what plant varietals they were using before genetics existed.
Odds are there's some DNA floating around in there from the yeast or potentially barley. DNA and nucleic acids in general are able to last in the environment for thousands of years. The resulting DNA fragments that come from testing are actually considered contamination because they have potential to get into other samples and cause false positives.
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u/IndependentNote8427 6h ago edited 2h ago
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