Amber Ale: Brewing Beer From 45-Million-Year-Old Yeast

[The Straight Story]

An aroma like bread dough permeates Raul Cano's lab. He has just removed the cover from a petri dish, and the odor wafts up from several gooey yellow clumps of microorganisms that have been feeding and reproducing in a dark cabinet for the past few days. Cano, a 63-year-old microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, inspects the smelly little mounds lovingly. "These are my babies," he says, beaming. "My yeasty beasties."

The dish contains a variant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known in culinary circles as baker's or brewer's yeast. But Cano didn't get this from Whole Foods. Back in 1995, he extracted it from a 45 million-year-old fossil. The microorganisms had lain dormant since the Eocene epoch, a time when Australia split off from Antarctica and modern mammals first appeared. Then Cano brought the yeast back to life.

This reanimation of an ancient life form was a breakthrough, a discovery so shocking that the scientific community initially refused to believe it. It changed our understanding of what microorganisms are capable of. It also gave the Cal Poly researcher a brief taste of fame. For a while, he thought it might make him rich. It didn't. Now, just when it seemed his babies would be forgotten, Cano has found a way to share them with the world.

....

Cano's Saccharomyces coupled with Hackett's know-how to yield a very tasty libation, which is now made and distributed under the name Fossil Fuels Brewing Company. "We won the lottery," Hackett says. "It's such a random thing. A yeast cell, captured in amber, found by a mad scientist. For it to perform well, for it to perform uniquely ... I wouldn't have bet on it."

Fossil Fuels pale ale caused a stir among beer aficionados like William Brand, a former critic with The Oakland Tribune who raved about it on his blog. He noted its "light copper color and an intense clove aroma." He liked its sweetness and the "intriguing, very odd spicy note" in the finish.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-08/ff_primordial_yeast?currentPage=2

Pretty interesting read. JJ walker would call the beer DINO-mite!

[onehandle]

1. Mmm... Pre-Historic Beer. I'd try it. nt

[joeybee12]

2. So we can get drunk just the way the dinsoaurs did?

Wait, the freepers won't drink this...after all, yeast can only be 6,000 years old.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. How much is a brazilian?

Prediction: This thread will consist almost entirely of the same played "I thought the world's only 6,000 years old" joke.

[Stevenmarc]

4. Well they won't be serving it at the Creation Museum snack bar

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. No school like the old school.

Reminds me of my high school days, when beer cans had that little thing that came all the way off and made great fashion accessories.

Oh, you said 45 million years ago.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. Hey, we used those pull-tabs in MY high school to make suits of

chain armor for our 'Camelot' production. From 40' away they looked pretty good.

Not that it has anything to do with anything.

[The Straight Story]

8. If you ever find the pics of that....

Gotta see em. Especially after I have a few dino beers :)

[Xipe Totec]

6. They got a website

http://www.fossilfuelsbrewingco.com/

[RoccoR5955]

9. Just because Saccharomyces Cerevisiae is that old doesn't mean that

they started brewing beer that long ago. It could have thrived on many types of grain.

However, there is documented proof that Mead, aka Honeywine goes back between 20,000 and 40,000 years. It is well documented in Abyssinian cuneiform texts, that people drank mead. See http://www.medovina.com/history.htm for more about this.

Today there are many strains of S. Cerevisiae that are used in brewing ales, lagers, and other beers. Chances are that this strain is an ale strain, because of the temperature necessary in these older critters. See more about today's beer yeast strains here: http://beeradvocate.com/beer/101/yeast and here: http://www.byo.com/resources/yeast Though many would tell you that brewing is a science, there is enough art in it to let your creative juices flow. I can tell you from experience. I was the VP of a local homebrew club here in the Scenic Hudson Valley.

It's quite amazing to look back on the history of brewing. It seems that every early civilization had its own unique fermented beverage. It's really quite amazing. There were also many uses for ales and meads that were used as curatives, with the addition of herbs.


Though I prefer mead to ale/beer, but I would be willing to try some of the ancient strain in some homebrew. It would be a nice experiment to see just what this strain does. It seems that this brewer hit the jackpot in his little bit of amber. The little yeasties didn't give up. They just went to sleep, and rewarded the person who woke them up with a fine brew. (yes, I sometimes call them my pets, but we won't go there.)

As Charlie Papazian says, "Relax. Don't worry. Have a homebrew." Or even a microbrew. Most of all, have a brew with FLAVOR. You will never regret it.

[scubadude]

10. Yeah, home-brews are often better than commercial brews.

I have had the privilege of trying quite a few and it is my experience that the care that goes into home-brews shows.

Although I don't have any home-brews on hand at the moment, I think I will go have one of what I do have on hand, extremely dark beers. Perhaps a Russian Imperial stout.

Mead is great too. I've got to get some, I'm out. The next best thing for a hot summer day is Scotty Karate Scotch Ale from Dark Horse Brewing. Its like drinking liquid sunshine.

Scuba

On edit I ended up with a Founders Porter. Three times darker that Guiness, way better tasting and about 70% more alcohol...

[RoccoR5955]

11. If you like that, try Old Rasputin. It's my fave Imperial Stout

Here's the website. http://www.northcoastbrewing.com/beer-rasputin.htm
You gotta love the label too!

[scubadude]

18. Yeah, I really enjoy Old Rasputin.

I'm a bit of a Russian Imperial Stout fan. Some of my favorite are Three Floyds Dark Lord, Surley Darkness, Goose Island's Nightstalker and Kentucky Breakfast Stout among others.

I passed on the Old Rasputin this very evening. I frequent an establishment that has over 30 Micro brews on tap, including O.R.. Tonight I went for wimpy beers like Two Brothers Hop Juice instead of the O.R.... Wanted something lighter.

Check out their list, and they are bit low at the moment.

http://www.brixies.com/

Scuba

[struggle4progress]

12. The 45 million year marketing claim is almost certainly pure bullshit: the genome is coded

in DNA, which is a rather fragile molecule, and which degrades steadily with time. For preservation, one needs low temperature and some protection against mineral substitution. Amber or a salt matrix or clay-mud burial might provide some protection of a sample, but temperature considerations may be important: for an otherwise protected sample, normal temperate zone or equatorial ground temperatures will probably lead to substantial degradation within a few 100Ka. The DNA recovered from amber insect remains is typically degraded into small fragments. Thus, old DNA is usually only associated with very unusual circumstances: such as frozen samples buried beneath ice packs, and even in ice nothing viable survives beyond about the 100Ka mark

... Kay Bidle of Rutgers University has managed to bring back to life some fossil bacteria trapped in Antarctic ice at least 100,000 years old. The ancient bacteria started to develop metabolism and to grow when offered warmth and nutrients in a lab. The team investigated five samples of ice ranging from 100,000 years to 8 million years in age. "We didn't really know what to expect. We knew that microorganisms were really hardy," said Bidle, an assistant professor of marine and coastal sciences. The 8 million years probes were taken from the oldest known ice on Earth, but the researchers managed to bring back to life only bacteria from the younger samples. "Microorganisms from the older ice didn't do as well, growing only very slowly. Some of the oldest microorganisms were watched for as long as a year, compared to the week or so it usually takes to culture bacteria." said Bidle ...
Frozen Fossils Have Been Brought Back to Life
Ancient bacteria trapped in the Antarctic ice
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Frozen-Fossils-Have-Been-Brought-Back-to-Life-62040.shtml

... Bacteria in Baltic amber were first studied by Blunck (1929) after partially dissolving the amber. Light microscopy revealed micrococci, short and longer rods, and spiral forms, and on the basis of these data, different taxa were established. More recently several attempts have been made to revive fossil bacteria and to analyse its genetic material. These attempts have reproduced bacterial DNA sequence which are different from that of the extant species, but there is certain reservation in the literature concerning the reliability of the results obtained (Cano and Borucki 1995; Greenblatt et al, 1999) ...
Ultrastructure of 100 Million Years Old Microorganisms of the Ajkaite (Upper Cretaceous Amber) from Hungary
M. Kedves and Á. Párdutz
pdf: tai2.ntu.edu.tw/udth/bin/taiwania.exe/dl?id=334
google html: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:ERQsDnz-LOwJ:tai2.ntu.edu.tw/udth/bin/taiwania.exe/dl%3Fid%3D334+fossil+microorganism+dna&cd=2&hl=en

[Horus45]

16. I agree, sounds like BS to me.

I am a Microbiologist and I don't believe it is possible to find a viable cell in a fossil.

[struggle4progress]

17. I haven't tried to hunt down his old work, but I'd bet he claims to have extracted

old DNA, amplified it with PCR, and then inserted it into an existing cell -- rather than claiming to have extracted viable cells. Or, perhaps more likely, he claimed to have extracted a few fragments, which he amplified, putatively identified, and then he spliced into an existing genome

There seem to be some claims in the literature that fragments of very old DNA can be found in some fossils, such as mineralized bone (where the claim seems to be that parts of the bone interior were only gradually mineralized and DNA fragments were stabilized by abduction to certain crystal surfaces) -- but with bone, it's difficult to imagine how one could identify the origin of the recovered fragments, given the post-mortem contamination possibilities. For material recovered from amber inclusions, I suppose there is less possibility of contamination and microscopic morphology might actually identify inclusions as yeast -- though I'd expect very low yields, since the original resin would probably be reactive with a variety of bio-molecules over the time periods involved

But I'm not a biochemist

[guitar man]

13. Jurassic beer?

:rofl:

[Sebastian Doyle]

14. OK, I gotta try this shit

Where can I get a sixer? :beer:

[Horus45]

15. I'm a skeptic

As a Microbiologist I am very skeptical about this because fossils do not contain organic material, by definition they are fossilized.
It would be impossible to remove a viable cell from a fossil, much less find one.

[Robb]

19. Reminds me of Flag Porter

"...brewed from a traditional 19th century British recipe using yeast salvaged from a vessel which sank in the English Channel in 1825." :D

Interesting story, and actually quite drinkable:

http://www.legendslimited.com/flag.html