That makes sense. There has also been a lot of debate about what constitutes a ‘species’. Old wisdom said that if they could reproduce and create viable offspring - same species - But this mostly true only with animals. Plants, fungi, and bacteria are much more capable of hybridizing. 1998 was before the massive genetic sequencing advances of early 2000’s too.
Per the reply to my email to wyeast, they are separate species and web page is wrong.
Woo-hoo! 
Cheers.
Group hug: )
aawwww… :-[
Those weren’t torches they were tiki torches. "If you like pina coladas… "
Saccharomyces cerevisiae in Latin translates roughly to sugar fungus (Saccharomyces) of beer (cerevisiae). It’s no coincidence that the Spanish word for beer is cerveza.
At one point, all brewing strains were classified as Saccharomyces cerevisiae (the species also includes wine and baker’s yeast). However, the field of yeast genetics has determined that lager strains are hybrids of two different species within the Saccharomyces genus; namely, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Saccharomyces eubayanus. The Latin name for this hybrid is Sacchormyces pastorianus. Furthermore, the field of yeast genetics has determined that their are two genetically different yeast families within the S. pastorianus species; namely, Frohberg and Saaz. Here’s a link to a recent paper that sheds new light on the Frohberg and Saaz families: http://www.g3journal.org/content/early/2014/02/26/g3.113.010090.full.pdf+html. The researchers sequenced Carlsberg Bottom Yeast No. 1 (the first pure culture lager strain, which is also a Saaz strain) and W-34/70 (which is a Frohberg strain) for the study.
I don’t know anything about that publication, and I am not an expert in yeast or genomes, but I made it past the abstract and I thought that it sounded interesting and I could probably pick out the important parts that I can understand. Then I got to the first line of the introduction…
“Starting from the early ages of agriculture and the domestication of barley fermented beverages played an important role in the emerging societies.”
…and I thought: whatever happened to commas! I had to read that sentence three times before it made sense to me, and there are none of them fancy words in there neither.
I will trudge through the the science and hope that the grammar doesn’t slow me down.
The authors are non-native English speakers. I have had the pleasure of exchanging a couple of e-mails with Jürgen Wendland. His native language is German.
The field of yeast genetics was pioneered at Carlsberg Laboratory in the thirties and forties by Øjvind Winge. Øjvind was lucky in that his assistant was an American scientist named Catherine Roberts. I have a culture in my bank that was deposited by Catherine Roberts while she was working with Øjvind in the forties.
Ya well, I coached Vic Wild in football and raced him on MT Hood. (True Story)
Go back to Soviet Russia, ya commie!
Which is what I said…damn, every once in a while I get one! 