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Ancient Yeast Used To Brew Modern Beer
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Yeast trapped inside a 45 million year old weevil, trapped inside amber has been extracted, activated, and used to brew beer. According to the report, the beer has 'a weird spiciness at the finish.' The brewer, Raul Cano, a scientist at the California Polytechnic State University, attributes this to the yeast's unusual metabolism. 'The ancient yeast is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates, unlike more modern yeasts, which can consume just about any kind of sugar,' said Cano. Cano brews barrels of Pale Ale and German Wheat Beer under the Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. label."
I'm proud that slashdotters have avoided the obvious Bea Arthur joke.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I go to school there. I might try to go and get a taste of that 45 million year beer.
Even more interesting is we now have successfully ressurrected a life form that was presumably dormant for 45 million years.
If we can do this with other multimillion-year-old spores, seeds, and other "deep freeze"-states of living creatures, we might be able to bring back some of Jurassic Park without resorting to cloning.
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Something that applies to "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."!! :)
Apparently they are having some difficulty with the beer, having broken out of its electric fences, it's been chasing around the lab technicians.
Hopefully they won't figure out how to open the doors.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Finally! Science does something genuinely useful.
Actually, I'm kind of curious how they were able to revive the yeast. That feat alone makes the article interesting. The beer is just a good finish to a hard day's work at the lab.
The comment in the article about the yeast possibly evolving to metabolize a greater range of carbohydrates reminded me of the E-coli evolution experiment that recently garnered renewed attention when a major evolutionary change occured after about 30,000 generations.
What kind of head do you get from yeast that old?
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Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
http://www.fossilfuelsbrewingco.com/
If you want to try it looks like you're going to have to go to California.
.sdrawkcab si gis siht
Man, that's going to be one malty beer!
I'm wondering what this yeast's brewing profile is. Could it lager? What's it attenuation?
An interesting achievement and a even neater application of science!
import system.cool.Sig;
If we can do this with other multimillion-year-old spores, seeds, and other "deep freeze"-states of living creatures, we might be able to bring back some of Jurassic Park without resorting to cloning.
I suspect we'd be limited primarily to species that have a spore state. Bringing back old yeast is nowhere near as difficult as bringing back old vertebrates - yeast form spores to be able to sit out starvation indefinitely - I don't know many vertebrates that can do the same.
Without a spore stage, the degradation of DNA and cellular machinery could be severe, and even bringing back a vertebrate encased in amber could be excruciatingly difficult (if possible at all).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
> ...we might be able to bring back some of Jurassic Park without resorting to cloning.
Or at least Cretaceous Park, or possibly even Cenozoic Park.
Something worth reading.
I feel a great disturbance in the Keg. As if millions of ancient yeast suddenly produced vast amounts of alcohol, and were suddenly consumed. I fear something terrible has happened.
*burp*
Any microbiologists want to let us know how yeast can survive that long? I mean, it was in amber so I assume it wasn't actually active all that time. But you'd think that after 45 million years no cell machinery would even exist, let alone function.
Give this poster some 1ups, please. Funny, AND on-topic. How efficient of you...
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
So apparently the news is that it doesn't taste as bad anymore for some strange reason? marketing? ;)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619792.500-they-came-from-40-million-bc.html
There are two California Polytechnic State Universities, one in San Luis Obispo and one in Pomona. Dr. Raul Cano is at CalPoly SLO. I guess their new slogan can be "Learn by brewing"...
EPIC ALE!
Hell is other people's code.
Beer and mead and cider are so fun to make.
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This is kinda disturbing. If an alien race wants to take us over, will they just put something in an alcoholic drink and claim that it will give us a high like never before? We wouldn't be able to resist. "Sure, it's melting my face off. But oh, what a clean finish!"
Kidding aside, how did this guy know that a 45 Million year old yeast wouldn't, you know, kill him? If it's that old it couldn't have been used (and therefore proven safe) by our ancestors--that way predates human evolution. Couldn't it have produced a lethal biotoxin? Afterall, alcohol itself is just a mild biotoxin--but it'll kill you too in enough quantity. Couldn't this have produced unusual strength, or unknown secondary biotoxins?
I guess that's what undergraduats are for. He probably "tested" this sample at a CPSU beer bash on freshmen fraternity students before releasing his finding.
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$tar -xvf
You don't want to consume the yeast itself. It'll give you Jurrasic-level shits.
Um, I thought the whole point of adding lactose and dextrins was that yeast (modern or not) can't eat that stuff, so you get to keep some sugar in your fermented beer (for body). Isn't (even modern) yeast limited to eating the really simple sugars (glucose and maltose)?
Maybe this ancient yeast can't even handle maltose or something?
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Call me up when they make a bourbon from some ancient, preserved corn.
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This could produce a new bread flavor, as different from baker's yeast and sourdough breads as they are from each other.
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Take ancient DNA to make dinosaur clones to rule the world? or ancient super diseases? or morally questionable practices? Nope, "Hey I know! Let's make beer out of it!" There are very very few times I love my country. This is definitely one of them. I would love 2 bottles of this. One to try, one as a souvenir.
that would be kombucha.
No way is a little thing like life more interesting that beer.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Now when we go down on the ladies, they'll dispense beer. Isn't that how it works?
Couldn't this be as dangerous as stuff from space? Millions of years might have been plenty of time for us to LOSE an immunity to something.
It begs the question "Did you make sure it was safe before drinking it?".
But multicelled animals provide multiple copies of their DNA. Multiple samples can be sequenced and error-correction computations performed to arrive at an error-free transcription.
Now I for one certainly wouldn't oppose doing a (insert extinct animal species here) genome project for as many extinct animals as possible. However, as someone with genomics experience, I can say it is a very long and involved process just to sequence a genome.
And then on top of that, your proposal would then involve progressing on to building new chromosomes from the sequenced data - because just rebuilding broken chromosomes could introduce potentially crippling error rates.
So unfortunately, I don't think we're there yet. Once our techniques progress for synthetic chromosomes, then we may be able to use them as scaffolding for bringing back extinct organisms.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Seems like it is also called "Tyrannosaurus-Rat beer" or "T-Rat beer" for short. Somehow that was also lost to marketing I suppose:
http://calpolynews.calpoly.edu/magazine/Spring-08/ancient-ale.html
(from the link of their front page at the right bottom).
Am I the only one that would think twice before actually ingesting this stuff?
It just doesn't sound like a great idea. I'd wait a few months and see how the first guys to have a drink are doing.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Later on the scientists realized that the "weird spiciness" was due to the fact that they were trying to make beer out of a weevil's dung.
So the yeast from the gut of a 45M Year old weevil is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates compared to modern yeast.
But have they compared it to yest from the guts of current day Weevils?
Unwanted yeasts and bacteria can get easily out of hand. And being that this particular yeast strain might thrive in environments different from those of modern yeasts, it could very well grow more populous in the intervening period between brews. And if it's that disruptive to brewing, who's to say how it would impact the rest of life around it. Now apply that to 'other multimillion-year-old spores, seeds, and other "deep freeze"-states of living creatures'.
Evolution doesn't reward "better" anything except "better suited to particular circumstances." That could be wildly unpredictable for species that fell by the wayside, as it's not always predictable how they fell by the wayside in the first place.
Any species with a dependence on another will die off when that other species does, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be better suited to species that have thrived since that time.
[quote] the beer has 'a weird spiciness at the finish.[/quote]
I wonder why
its stale as shit