Scientists find lager beer's missing link — in Patagonia

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
August 23, 2011
How did lager beer come to be? After pondering the question for decades, scientists have found that an elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the crisp-tasting German beer 600 years ago.

It took a five-year search around the world before a scientific team discovered, identified and named the organism, a species of wild yeast called Saccharomyces eubayanus that lives on beech trees.

"We knew it had to be out there somewhere," said Chris Todd Hittinger, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a coauthor of the report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Their best bet is that centuries ago, S. eubayanus somehow found its way to Europe and hybridized with the domestic yeast used to brew ale, creating an organism that can ferment at the lower temperatures used to make lager.


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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-beer-yeast-20110823,0,5421077.story

Those Darn Vikings!

i know there are/were beech woods in europe -- wouldn't they transfer looking harder in europe for wild variations there?

Oh, that is so not good enough.

Especially since the Vikings were not Germanic and unlikely to share such a discovery. Where is the Viking lager?

Sure they were. Swedes, Danes, Geats, etc. were all Germanic tribes, weren't they? I may not be up on the most recent haplotype research, but I thought this was settled.

Also, "sharing" is not as simple as altruistic giving. Even if they jealously guarded this knowledge, they still could have "shared" it in a variety of ways.

But I agree that "somehow" is far from good enough.

and he has your Yeast culture. There are many historical examples of valuable crops being stolen and propagated elsewhere. Cocoa, Pienapples, Rubber Trees, and many more. Yeast are no different, just easier to hide.

Perhaps the Yeast got to Patagonia in the backpack of an escaped Nazi. :rofl:

My real interest is in the claim that "Vikings" (a term I dislike but accept as common parlance) weren't Germanic. And what that has to do with sharing.

I think it is far more likely that the yeast culture that started this traveled from Europe to S. America after lagers creation, rather than traveling from S. America to Europe before that creation. Early settlers and explorers often bring with them those things needed for their way of life. Beer is a mainstay of culture. Makes sense that yeast for it's making would have been brought over.

Sure, had a new yeast been identified it would have surely been brought back. But would it have happened so soon? And if it had, wouldn't its exotic, foreign nature have been a selling point, like new spices? Yes, and records would have recorded it as such. But it going from Europe to S.America would not have been news worthy.

Vikings? Does anyone think that Vikings made it down to S. America and then managed to return? Really?

Perhaps a bit of trade from China made its way round the Indian Ocean, and introduced the yeast to Europe in that way. The bubonic plague got to Europe from China about 100 years before the first lagers, after all ...