Nice paper. Dr. Maitreya Dunham at U. Washington presented on drift with consecutive pitches at HomebrewCon Portland. Our friend Tom Schmidlin PhD owns PostDoc in Redmond WA, where that study was done, and data from his brewery is in this paper too.
I found it interesting, as the Bell’s House Strain is included, and it is a Chico strain, but has its own house character now.
There are two groupings of Chico yeast. One thing pointed out is that there may be an unknown ancestor.
Mark’s post on WLP-051 jogged my memory on this paper. It loads slow for me be patient.
Super cool! Thanks for sharing this – evolution in action! I’ve always thought it would be cool to see how the genetics of yeast cultures changes from pitch to pitch, especially for those strains where we’re warned that characteristics change with repitches.
I like that they actually named the strains in the phylogeny. The lack of commercial strain names was (in my opinion) a significant drawback of the Gallone et al. 2016 paper (and if I was a reviewer or editor on it, I would have asked they provide this information to allow reproducibility!)…okay, climbing off my open science soapbox now.
I found a really nice thread on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DunhamLab/status/1277707293774065664) from the lab head, which gives some additional background information in (slightly) simpler language than the paper itself. Even though I have a Ph.D. in anatomy/paleontology, I get a bit lost in these “gene squeezing” papers sometimes, so it was nice to see a more conversational version. And I suppose the slides are available for AHA members, from the Portland presentation? I will have to check them out!
As an aside for anyone reading this, the paper is not yet officially published; this is a preprint, which means it’s a mostly finished piece of work that has not yet been through formal peer review at a scientific journal. This doesn’t mean it’s unreliable, of course–just that it may change slightly between now and official publication. (or there is always a chance it will never make it through peer review, but that’s pretty unlikely given the expertise of the workgroup!)
I believe that they have the wrong genetic ancestor from Ballantine. They used Y-7408 when all roads point to the genetic ancestor to BRY-96 (a.k.a. Chico) being Y-7407. It would be interesting if they re-ran the genetic test with Y-7407 because the Schalk Brothers brewery predates lager pure cultures. BRY-96 does not form a head like Y-7408. If one visits the link that I included in my WLP051 thread that points to my old thread about these yeast strains, one will see a photo that indicates that the strain Ballantine used for ale production was a top cropper and BRY-97 (Y-7408) is a top cropper. I am willing to bet that BRY-96 came out of the Schalk Brothers’ lager brewery that Ballantine acquired. All roads lead to the direction. I wish that we could contact the researchers and have them compare Y-7407 against the BRY-96. Siebel knows where these strains originated.
Interesting point – agreed that it would be fun to see it re-run. I suppose you could contact the corresponding author listed on the PDF and ask about it? Although I wonder if it would ultimately make much of a difference in the overall tree topology for the more recently diverged strains that are nested more deeply within the phylogeny?
I sent a message to a message to Maitreya today letting her know that there is a lot of evidence that points to Y-7407 being the parent strain. BRY-96 is unlike any other yeast strain that is used on brewing. It will actively ferment colder than most ale strains and it is very lager-like when fermented cold. The Schalk Brothers brewery on Freeman Street was built in 1856, which predates the isolation of the first lager pure culture, Carlsberg Unterhefe No. 1 (CBS 1501), by Emil Hansen in 1883 by 27 years. Ballantine’s acquisition of the Schalk Brothers Brewery in a 1879 predates Carlsberg Unterhefe, which means that the brewery was still using a mixed culture in when it was acquired by Ballantine.
by Emil Han
For me, it is about scratching an itch that I have felt for the better part of a decade. Even if Y-7407 is not the parent culture for BRY-96, it will allow me to move on.
After building and interpreting evolutionary trees for dinosaurs for the better part of 20 years now, I’m just excited that I can apply those skills to learn more about brewing. Definitely scratching an itch here, too.
And more practically, seeing the evolutionary relationships of the various strains will help me think more critically about substitutions across yeast distributors, dry vs. liquid subs, etc.
Well, Chris Large responded to the message that I sent to Maitreya, which humbles me because I am just a lowly amateur brewing scientist. There is new information. To my chagrin, it appears that Y-7407 is a indeed a lager strain, at least genetically. Secondly, the culture is a tetraploid (4 sets of chromosomes), not a diploid as originally claimed in Dunn and Sherlock’s publication. However, the most interesting part is that they are in touch with the Lallemand scientist who knows the history of BRY-96 and BRY-97 (Lallemand purchased the Siebel Institute several years ago). It appears that their first sequence of BRY-97 may have been of a contaminant. However, they are currently sequencing a new culture from the original deposit of BRY-97 and it appears to align with Wyeast 1056. From what I am led to believe, BRY-97 is an isolate from a brewery that acquired BRY-96 from Siebel that is superior to the original. I do not know about you, but this information unbelievably cool to me. We are looking at brewing history through the lense of genetics.
I guess that the lesson to be learned here is that cultures will adapt to their environment. I have seen that play out in my sourdough culture. It was all over the place when I first started to make sourdough. Now, it is developing into a more reliable culture. In my humble opinion, every brewer should maintain a sourdough culture and bake sourdough bread. It will give him/her a greater understanding of how the pure brewing cultures we enjoy today evolved.
By the way, here is a photo my gloved hand holding a Siebel culture from a few years ago. If one Googles the address on the slant (6100 Royalmount, Montreal, Canada), one will discover that it is the Lallemand campus in Canada.
Wow!!! That’s incredibly cool…thank you so much for following up on that. I hope the new info will make it into the publication, and into a revised preprint too.
That bit about Bry-97 and Bry-96 being so closely related is very interesting. From my hobbiest perspective that makes sense as they make similar beers. Except, I have never had peach esters with Bry-97.
Well, it adds credence to my assertion that BRY-97 is Anchor’s ale strain. Anchor started to brew Liberty ale in 1975. Where did they acquire their ale strain? We know that the steam strain was acquired from Wallerstein labs in 1974 from an interview their head brewer gave. Before that date, Anchor used yeast from other breweries. The question is did Anchor acquire BRY-96 from Siebel, use it, and then attempt to bank it in Siebel’s culture collection? Here’s clue: 27K views · 1K reactions | Liberty Ale Open Fermentation | We've been making Liberty Ale in open fermenters since 1975. Over 40 years later, it's still revolutionary. | By Anchor Brewing Company | Facebook That looks like BRY-97 in action. I am making a big assumption that the use of open fermenters and top-cropping is the selective pressure that created BRY-97 from BRY-96. Almost everyone else is using BRY-96 or one of its descendants in conical fermenters. That practice is going to select for other characteristics.
With that being said, I would like to run an experiment with you guys where were we attempt to force a non-strong top cropping yeast strain to become a strong top-cropping strain via selective pressure. To do that, we would have to serially repitch yeast that was cropped from the top. Most modern ale strains have been conditioned to work in conical fermenters, but there are still cells that floc to the top. The trick is to select these cells from the other cells.
I have learned a lot about cultures from making sourdough bread (if one has to attempted to make sourdough, it definitely appeals to the hardcore all-grain brewer). I started my culture with 100ml of pineapple juice and 50g of organic whole wheat flour. I stepped it up, but I was not getting the rise I wanted from the culture because it was mostly lactic and acetic bacteria. I decided to start taking two tablespoons of starter and using it to innoculate 100grams of organic whole wheat mixed into 100ml of filtered water every 12 hours. By discarding all but two tablespoons of the culture every time I propagated it, I reduced the culture to the organisms that could reproduce significantly in 12 hours, which basically eliminated all of the weak wild yeast strains. Now, my sourdough starter will at least double after feeding it after removing what I plan to use to make bread and placing it immediately back in the refrigerator. It is the craziest thing to see a sourdough starter double in the refrigerator. There are definitely cold tolerant wild strains of Saccharomyces as well as wild yeast strains from a different genus. One of these days, I am going to plate my sourdough culture for singles.
Well, the plot thickens day by day. I contacted Siebel the other day as to why they removed the old list of cultures that they provided on slant. Well, I learned that major things are on the horizon. It appears that Lallemand is gearing up to provide a host of new yeast services. While most of these services are out the question for most amateur brewers due to cost, for guys like me who are also amateur brewing scientists with little to no bounds, it is welcome news. Lallemand has the resources to propel craft brewing and amateur brewing to new highs and they appear to be eager to play in this space.
With that said, they were interested in talking to me because I have acquired strains from Siebel in the past (I receive periodic messages from Siebel and Lallemand). For me, the most interesting new information is that instead of sending me the old strain accession number list with brewing descriptions as I had requested, they sent me a spread sheet that among other things allows the reader to ascertain when a yeast culture was first recorded in Siebel bank. I do not know how hold it is, but BRY-96 has a “reception” date of 4/1/1967. That predates the G.W. Lange’s deposits in the ARS NRRL. I am assuming that that means that Siebel has been in possession of the culture since at least 1967 (BRY-96 was labeled as being from a former brewery on the East Coast in the old Siebel culture description). If we look at Ballantine’s history, we see that 1967 was tumultuous year, a strike followed by an anti-trust suit against big lager brewers for attempting to destroy their business (pballantineandsons - ballantinetimeline2). Needless to say, banking their culture would be insurance if they had to start all over. I am more convinced than ever that BRY-96 is a Ballantine isolate. Now, the question is what isolate? What is interesting is that the spread sheet labels BRY-96’s fermentation progress as slow. That matches BRY-97 more than Wyeast 1056, WLP001, US-05, and Chico from the bottle. Now, the question is, did Sierra Nevada change how the culture behaves via selective pressure by cropping from conical fermentation vessels? Man, we are in the golden age of brewing yeast. Between genetic sequencing and the culture collections looking to get into the game, what we see today is for what I have been waiting for almost thirty years.
That’s a very interesting timeline. I had never heard of a Ballantine until reading about them on forums. My dad drank Miller High Life. Now I see the Ballantine beers lasted until well past the year 2000.
You say the spreadsheet talks about BRY-96. Does it mention BRY-97? What does it say about BRY-97?
