Big Brewing: Lies, Fueds and S. Carlsbergensis.

What’s in beer?

When I last asked this at a fancy gastropub, around a polished wooden table and ridiculously priced pints, I received a bunch of blank stares. One mate tentatively responded “hops?”.

Another replied “dunno”. He punctuated this by draining his glass.

Alcohol, in the last few years, has exploded in popularity — the market is thriving with small-scale brewers and distillers, and colourful IPAs line the shelves at Aldi.

However, whilst spirits are simple and largely understood, beer and lager remain chemical quizzes. This has allowed several market-leaders’ marketing teams to slide in some porky pies about their pints.

(To answer that question — hops, barley, water, and yeast).

Plants turn light, water and air into sugar. This process is the singular most important element to malting; it defines the most obvious flavour profiles in lager, beer and ale.

Following from the malting process, yeast performs a miracle, transcribed in the following chemical reaction:

Sugar -> Ethanol + Carbon dioxide.

This process was discovered by Antoine Lavoisier, the French aristocrat who discovered oxygen and hydrogen. Sandor Katz in his text Wild Fermentation describes it with a suitable amount of reverie:

It’s an everyday miracle. Microscopic bacteria and fungi are in every breath we take and food we eat…Microbial cultures are essential to life’s processes…we humans are in a symbiotic relationship with these single-cell life forms. Not only are we dependent on microorganisms, we are their descendents. According to the fossil record, all forms of life on earth spring from bacterial origin.

Though it would be another century before Antione’s process was linked to an unassuming microorganism, eventually we discovered and isolated the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae — now used for brewing, winemaking and bread baking. Its cousins can tolerate different amounts of alcohol, different environments and preferences.

Wild yeast gives up at over 5% ABV — but without even knowing it, we’ve been breeding yeast for hundreds of thousands of years, as breweries become selective environments in which only higher-alcohol yeasts thrive.

Getting yeast to ferment is relatively easy — demonstrated by the oldschool brewing stick, still used in Scandinavian kvass and African sorghum beer. This was a wooden stick reserved for the purpose of mixing the ingredients together. We now know that it’s due to yeast molecules, chilling on the stick, being activated by a new source of sugar every time the stick is plunged into a fresh batch. However, getting yeast to ferment the exact same way every time is tricky.

Yvan de Baets, brewer at Brasserie de la Senne, says “When I think about my yeast, I don’t regard it as an ingredient, I regard her as one of the team. She’s my best friend in the brewery”.

The fermentation process is similar to babysitting — it’s not something we have total control over, we just push and pull the yeast in the right direction, similar to how one coaxes a tantruming toddler out of a busy store.

Mediaeval brewers began repitching yeast from one brew to the next, realising that the froth was vital to fermentation. Up to a very recent point in time, advances in yeast understanding was all about improving a drink’s quality. The story of an industry’s lies begins at this point in time.

J. C. Jacobsen set up the Carlsberg brewery in 1847, naming it after his son. Two years beforehand, he had visited a friend and mentor in Munich, at the Spaten brewery. Returning with a jar of Belgian yeast, this yeast became the thriving colony that churned out the first decade of Carlsberg success.

Within this decade, Jacobsen has started to argue with his son, Carl. The father wished for him to brew ale — setting up in a tangential field, without becoming direct competitors. However, the son wished to brew lager. Returning from a year-long study tour in 1971, Carl began brewing lager. Incensed, J. C. withdrew his son from his will, instead setting up a charitable scientific fund under the Carlsberg Foundation.

One year after the research institute was established, Pasteur made a breakthrough discovery. He published Etudes Sur le Vin in 1866, finally establishing that yeast was responsible for fermenting alcohol, and souring milk.

Emil Hansen — top scientist at the Carslberg institute — had his own copy of Etudes, scribbled on profusely. The copy survives today — next to Pasteur’s detailing on pasteurisation, he writes “this question is much more complicated, since not one but several yeast survive the mentioned treatment…How do you get that absolute pure culture?”

Hansen began work on separating out his own yeast, learning how to isolate individual cells. By suspending a group in liquid, counting the cells, then meticulously reducing the quantity of water, he had a single cell. Transferring it over to a gelatine nutridish, he then grew the first ‘pure’ yeast strain.

By 1883, Carlsberg was struggling with ‘beer disease’. Their beer was overly sour, and this had started to impact sales. Hansen used his new techniques of cultivation to isolate three strains of yeast from the breweries. The first he named Unterhefe 1 — this gave a bright beer with good flavour and stability. Unterhefe 2 produced a slightly fuller taste than 1, but its beers didnt keep as long. The third line produced excessively smoky and bitter beers, and had been the cuase of the beer disease— Hansen nicknamed this S. Pastorianus (yes, after Pasteur — their rivalry is a long story).

J.C. was convinced — he renamed Unterhefe 1 to Saccharomyces Carlsbergensis — and immediately switched all production over to the single strain.

This, understandably, revolutionised brewing. Beer offered — for the first time — the clean, crisp taste that we so often take for granted today. It was a nigh guarantee of excellent flavour, vital to any brand.

Furthermore, this advancement was made under the research foundation, which meant the process was effectively public-domain. By the time of Hansen’s death in 1909, all major beer breweries had switched to single-strain.

So, fast forward a few centuries, to a Heineken Breweries tour, on a rainy day in Amsterdam. The tour guide opened the lot with “Heineken A Yeast is just like my wife: extremely demanding, but worth it”. A young couple looked at each other, pulling the sort of face you’d make after pouring too much pepper on a meal.

On the tour, guests are told this yeast “changed the future of beer forever”. According to the Heineken Experience, the Heineken Lab is responsible for “isolating and growing the perfect yeast — the best, purest yeast — for every brewery, now and forever”.

Sure, Heineken A yeast creates their sweet flavour profile. However, to state that Heineken pioneered single-strain cultivation is an outright lie. This Heineken A yeast was derived using Hansen’s techniques — made freely available by the Carlsberg Laboratory. Online marketing materials also fail to adequately state this. In fact, Heineken even sent a letter to the Carlsberg Laboratory saying thank you for the techniques.

Also — remember S. Carlsbergensis? throughout Hansen’s lifetime, he was indignantly opposed to anyone who claimed that S. Carlsbergensis was actually just a variety of S. cerevisiae. Modern genetics research has allowed researchers to compare differences between the strains — turns out, Hansen and J.C. had isolated the singularly most important species of yeast to beer production. The researchers reinstated Cerevisiae as the name, and renamed Carlsbergensis to Pastorianus. Even 100 years after both mens’ deaths, the rivalry continues.