A new way forward for beer brewing

‘Tales From the Future’, a beer made in a recent collaboration between researchers at The University of Manchester and Cloudwater Brew Co., will launch at the end of this month. The beer is uniquely brewed using a novel strain of yeast, a hybrid, developed by the the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) and Cloudwater, the University of Manchester writes in a press release.

Wild yeast species

Budding yeast has been integral to beer brewing since its conception, and recent discoveries of new wild yeast species have paved the way for exploiting the extant biodiversity in strain development. In 2017, Professor Daniela Delneri, from the MIB, and her team, isolated a new natural yeast species, Saccharomyces jurei, high up in the foothills of the French Alps.

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It is set apart from other similar brewing yeasts as it has the ability to thrive at lower temperatures, has a different flavour profile, and is able to ferment maltose and maltotriose, two abundant sugars present in the wort. This opened up an array of new possibilities for brewers, including the development of new breeding protocols to combine the S. jurei genome with the genomes of commercially available strains to create a multitude of hybrids with different fermentation characteristics.

Combining different yeast species

Professor Delneri says: “In fact, we have now also developed a method to turn typically sterile yeast hybrids into fertile cells able to produce a plethora of offspring which can be screened for desirable biotechnological traits. Such advances allow us to combine and select desirable traits from different yeast species via multigenerational breeding, paving the way for a swathe of new and exciting products”.

Read the full press release here.