Celebrating Beer, a True Microbial Tradition

Many years ago I saw a show on the history channel. Part of it detailed the conditions under which Guinness keeps the strain of yeast for their beers (I can't remember which variants). It's under lock and key with very limited access, and frozen in some ridiculous way, like you posted in the quote above.

It's so crazy how they can take a single sample of the yeast and turn it into enough beer to feed Ireland.

 

I don't recall where I got this from, but I believe yeasts were among the first organisms to be domesticated by man, so I'm not surprised that we have cultivated and secured strains for our use.

On a darker note, we also have lethal strains of pathogens similarly frozen and preserved

 

With a beer like Budweiser the reduction in the use of hops and malt, original gravity, the increase in attenuation and the introduction of high gravity brewing and subsequent dilution, will have had more of an impact on the final flavor than the maintaining of a bottom fermenting yeast strain I would think. I think Carlsberg uses the same yeast as in 1847 when JC Jacobsen brought some yeast from Sedlmayr's brewery in Munich, or at least a version of the yeast purified by his staff once the strain started degenerating, but the Carlsberg beer brewed today is far removed from the beer brewed in the 1840s, let alone the early 1900s, as I'm sure is also the case for Budweiser. One could make a 6%P 0.5% abv 5IBU Budweiser brewed with 2 and 6 row barley and rice, fermented with the Budweiser yeast, and hopped with a mixture of modern hop varieties as is the case for Budweiser today and claim that it's the same beer as 130 years ago, but it wouldn't be even remotely accurate.