The history of beer yeast
Today's industrial yeast strains are used to make beer, wine, bread, biofuels, and more, but their evolutionary history is not well studied. Researchers have now described a family tree of these microbes with an emphasis on beer yeast. The resulting genetic relationships reveal clues as to when yeast was first domesticated, who the earliest beer brewers were, and how humans have shaped this organism's development. Ref. Source 6m.
Modern beer yeast emerged from mix of European grape wine, Asian rice wine yeast. For thousands of years brewers made beer using specialized strains of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. A new study shows that modern brewing strains were derived from a mixture of European grape wine and Asian rice wine strains. This finding points to the emergence of beer yeast from a historical East-West transfer of fermentation technology. Source 4h.
It's amazing how the same practice is still done for thousands of years til today. Fermentation technology certainly made a massive contribution to the financial sector and will continue to have an impact to the public as a whole.
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