And for that we mere mortals are, oh, so grateful

Sep 25, 2015 21:18 GMT  ·  By

There are two kinds of beer in this world: ales and lagers. Ales are fermented at warm temperatures for short periods of time and date back to ancient times. Lagers, on the other hand, are fermented at low temperatures for quite a while and have only been around for a few centuries. 

What's interesting is that, whereas ales come in a wide variety of flavors, lagers all kind of taste the same. Well, or at least this used to be the case. Thanks to the work of researchers at the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology in Belgium, this is about to change.

These guys are brewing new lagers for us

Like ales, lagers are fermented with the help of yeasts. In a study published in today's issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, the research team explains that the reason lagers differ very little in flavor is that the yeasts used to make them have similar genetic profiles.

“The relative uniformity of flavor among lagers turned out to result in significant part from a lack of genetic diversity among the yeasts,” the scientists say.

In fact, it looks like the yeasts beer makers now use to produce lagers are all the love children of just two species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Saccharomyces eubayanus. These two species are very different from one another, and so getting them to make babies, i.e. new yeast varieties, is tricky business.

Still, the scientists managed to convince them to get romantic. The result: a small army's worth of new yeast varieties, each a potential candidate for a new lager.

“We were able to get some serious sexual action between our yeasts, which resulted in hundreds of new lager yeast strains,” explains researcher Kevin Verstrepen.

It's strenuous work brewing new beers

Of the hundreds of new yeast strains that they created in laboratory conditions, the researchers put a total of 31 to the test. Some turned out to be really bad, but others proved perfectly acceptable.

Eventually, the scientists settled on a couple of strains that, when tested in small scale beer fermentation, delivered nicely flavored lagers that, interestingly enough, also fermented faster that commercial varieties.

True, it will probably be a while until we get hundreds of lagers each with its own unique flavor to pick and choose from, but at least we now know the world of beer can grow to be more entertaining than it now is.