Interesting article about a beer historian and bioengineer who resurrected a 400-year old yeast and beer believed to be the oldest beer brewed in Latin America, dating back to 1566. https://phys.org/news/2022-08-year-old-ecuadoran-beer-resurrected-yeast.html See the article for more info.
Very cool. The prospect of the recreated beer is interesting but the prospect of the resurrected yeast strain is even more fascinating. Quito sits at nearly 2 miles above sea level. I imagine that the yeast that was endemic to that area had some interesting characteristics compared to the yeasts that have predominantly come from much lower elevation European brewing centers
"Not only have we recovered a biological treasure but also the 400-year-old work of silent domestication of a yeast that probably came from a chicha and that had been collected from the local environment," Carvajal told AFP. Chicha is a fermented corn drink brewed by the Indigenous people of the Americas before Spanish colonization. So, sort of from beer, possibly, may be...
“What is Beer? In the broadest sense, “beer” is any alcoholic beverage made by the fermentation of grain, just as wine is any alcoholic beverage made by the fermentation of fruit. In the vast majority of the world’s beers, the grain base is barley.” https://allaboutbeer.com/learn/beer/ From the above is sure seems like chicha is a beer to me. Cheers!
The yeast in chicha comes from the spit of the women who chew the corn and then spit it out into a vat for fermentation. So it would seem that batches would be different from family to family and village to village and/or region. Eh?
The "spit" (or saliva more appropriately) provides enzymes to convert the starches in the corn to sugar. You are mixing things up here. Cheers!
So the main difference between Budweiser and Chicha is that with Chicha you spit it out before fermentation?
