[HN Gopher] The origins of the Guinness stout yeast
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The origins of the Guinness stout yeast
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-01-14 12:40 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| galeos wrote:
| I appear to have a yeast intolerance that stops me drinking some
| (but not all) beers. I can drink Guinness though! I didn't
| realise it used a distinct strain of brewers yeast. If only
| breweries listed the yeast they used in the ingredients, I could
| narrow down which one(s) are problematic...
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Many beers are filtered to remove the yeast since it's not
| really desirable once fermentation has completed. BUT - and a
| big "but" - there are styles like hefeweizen and other
| unfiltered beers that deliberately leave the yeast in for
| flavour.
| redblacktree wrote:
| Many (most?) craft brewers also skip this step. "Desirable"
| is in the eye of the beholder, and crucially, it saves
| effort/time/money to leave it in. You can even market it as
| "bottle conditioned," if you allow the final bit of
| fermentation to do the carbonation. (i.e. add a bit of sugar
| at the bottling step, rather than bottling carbonated beer.
| humbleferret wrote:
| Really interesting point about yeast being left in beers. I
| always assumed yeast was removed at one point in all beer due
| to its role in fermentation. The idea that styles like
| hefeweizen intentionally keep the yeast for added flavour
| surprised me. On a similar note, as someone who only drinks
| non-alcoholic beer, I've noticed that while most use yeast,
| some opt for 'simulated fermentation' without it. Yet, to my
| taste, there isn't much difference between the two. This
| makes me curious about what specific flavour characteristics
| yeast is supposed to add. What should one look out for?
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| If you don't mind sharing, what are the symptoms you experience
| when you have a yeast you can't tolerate? I ask because I
| believe I might have a yeast intolerance of my own.
| galeos wrote:
| Relatively fast onset gastro symptoms. Used to be fine with
| any beer but at about 21 started noticing the problem with a
| lot of largers. Asahi, Tsing Tao, seemed less of a issue. Not
| formula diagnosed.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Those are rice beers. You might have an issue with the
| grains used rather than yeast as there's no active yeast in
| the vast majority of beer.
| FrankoDelMar wrote:
| And I suppose if someone really wanted to test out the
| beer-yeast theory, they could pasteurize the suspect beer
| and see if it causes the same issues.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| You'd still get yeast peptides and glycans in there
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Interesting. I have what are basically eosinophilic
| esophagitis symptoms (feels like a food impaction) that
| seems to be acutely triggered by unfiltered wheat beers but
| I'm not bothered by rice beers. I had also homed in on
| yeast as a possible culprit.
| winslow wrote:
| How did you find you have a yeast intolerance? Was there a test
| you took? I've had some GI issues that have also limited my
| consumption of beer despite having previously brewed beer along
| with many other things I can no longer eat.
|
| If you took a test that determined it was a yeast issue
| disregard but I'm curious if you've tried things like hop water
| (carbonated water with hops from beer). If you've had any
| reactions to that when it's just hops and water.
|
| Does bread give you issues? What about sourdough bread vs
| traditional bread yeast bread?
| ellisd wrote:
| At least for me, all it took to discover an intolerance to
| certain yeasts was visiting a tasting room for yeasts
| (https://www.whitelabs.com/) and sniffing a beer containing
| the specific type of yeast (Note: all the beers I was tasting
| were variating just the brewing yeast).
|
| The reaction caused a massive nasal congestion and a runny
| nose that essentially ended my ability to taste or enjoy
| further tastings for the day.
|
| I've also seen this reaction occur across very similar beers:
| Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier non-organic is totally fine,
| but the organic one will cause the nasal reaction.
| galeos wrote:
| Not tested. No issues at all with bread.
| bregma wrote:
| Is it an intolerance to the fungus itself or to one of their
| metabolic products, like a particular complex sugar or fusel
| oil, that end up being metabolized by your own intestinal flora
| to your detriment?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Pretty much every beer uses a distinct "strain" of yeast so
| that information is unlikely to be useful and it's probably
| full of noise[0]. As per this paper one thing makes Guinness
| interesting is that it's strain is fairly divergent.
|
| [0] There are strain banks like white labs that perform lots of
| analysis on the various beer strains.
| hackernoteng wrote:
| Those hazy-style IPAs absolutely wreak havoc on my stomach. I
| think the unfiltered yeast that does it. I also do drink
| Guinness without issues. Mostly it's hoppy IPA type beers that
| dont agree with me. More filtered traditional beers are ok.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I only recently discovered the hazy IPAs, I find them much
| easier to drink. Evolution is strange when 8t comes to
| tolerances.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| How much beer can you drink before you have issues?
|
| I used to get really sick around 16-24oz in. Then, one day
| someone explained to me that corn syrup has a lot of the
| reagent still in it, and I noticed that when I didn't consume
| drinks with corn syrup, I could consume more beer.
|
| I'm still limited to about 36oz, though.
| dublin wrote:
| About 15 years ago, I developed an unfortunate reaction to
| drinking beer: heartburn that made me wish I was dead. Kinda
| ruined Mexican and BBQ dinners, both of which are not just
| tasty, but cultural events here in Texas. The condition got
| progressively worse, but I still stepped up for the abuse from
| time to time,until I tried a thick, chewy porter or stout that
| did NOT trigger the dreaded heartburn. I still have the
| heartburn (I manage it with an unusual mineral supplement), but
| can almost always enjoy a good, dark, porter or stout (the
| darker, the better), which has improved life quite a bit!
| cubefox wrote:
| Similar story about lager yeast:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726235
| divbzero wrote:
| It's quite fitting that this paper on yeast from the Guiness
| Brewery uses the _t_ -test from the Guinness Brewery:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student's_t-test#History
| dekhn wrote:
| Yeast was known as godisgoode (this is speculative) and one of
| the great moments in biochemistry history was the isolation of a
| single yeast strain, which led to the industrialization of beer
| production as well as many other cool things (some yeasts are
| great models for genetics).
|
| "In 1883 the Dane Emil Hansen published the findings of his
| research at the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen and described the
| isolation of a favourable pure yeast culture that he labelled
| "Unterhefe Nr. I" (bottom-fermenting yeast no. 1),[10] a culture
| that he identified as identical to the sample originally donated
| to Carlsberg in 1845 by the Spaten Brewery of Munich.[11] This
| yeast soon went into industrial production in Copenhagen in 1884
| as Carlsberg yeast no. 1.[12]"
|
| It looks like the work by Pasteur and Hansen was continued here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisenheim_Yeast_Breeding_Cent...
|
| If there was ever a holy temple to the science of beer, it's
| https://www.carlsberggroup.com/who-we-are/carlsberg-research...
|
| The study of biochemical fermentation is known as "zymurgy" or
| "zymology" and the enzyme (it's zymes all the way down) that
| carries this out is zymase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zymase)
| lmm wrote:
| That industrialization of beer was a major step backwards;
| flavourless but cheap lager almost eliminated good traditional
| beer.
| Paul_S wrote:
| Modern beer, even the industrial lager you despise is much
| better that what 99% of people drank in the past. There is
| almost no bad beer, the standards for water quality and
| hygiene are high, the process and technology is well
| understood and we can replicate the same beer batch after
| batch, year after year.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I'm a homebrewer, and I quite enjoy using the Guinness yeast
| strain - Wyeast 1084 or White Labs WLP004. It gives a very
| distinctive fruity flavor that I can often taste in craft-brewed
| stouts and other ales. It also ferments SUPER fast, which can be
| very convenient at times.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Two more liquid yeasts of the Guinness strain:
|
| Escarpment Irish Ale
|
| Omega Irish OYL-005
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