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The biggest beer discovery in more than a century is about to re-emerge as a central topic of brewing circle conversations, eight years after an Argentine microbiologist found a seminal yeast in the jungles of Patagonia. Heineken and National Geographic are releasing a short documentary Monday to chronicle the journey that led Diego Libkind to find the yeast strain he and some colleagues determined to be the missing parent of lager yeast.
“We already had hundreds of options from the ale yeast but a limited number of strains from lager yeast,” he says. “Now we have hundreds of new hybrids. That means hundreds of new flavors.”
While Heineken owns the exclusive rights to use the Argentine Sacchromyces eubayanus yeast and share it with craft breweries that produce fewer than 34,000 barrels per year (1 barrel = 31 gallons), the yeast has since been found in the Blue Ridge and Himalayan mountains, with scientists expecting to find even more in cold-weather mountain ranges around the world. Heineken Master Brewer Willem van Waesberghe says he hopes to use the discovery to highlight the critical role of yeast in a beer’s aroma and flavor profiles.
In 2017 Heineken released the first commercial brew to use the yeast, called H41 after Bariloche’s latitude. While most lagers display a rather limited clean fermentation profile (think Heineken, Pabst Blue Ribbon or Corona), H41—available in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles and abroad—boasts ale-like scents and flavors of clove. It took van Waesberghe many tries to coax the wild yeast into digesting sugars it had never tasted before, and ultimately he had to boost the alcohol content by concentrating several batches of wort to compensate for the untrained yeast’s inability to produce the 5.3% alcohol by volume (ABV) he desired.
“We used the regular Heineken recipe because we wanted to show that when you change the yeast everything changes ,” he says. “The yeast makes a very clove-like taste which you immediately notice when you smell it. But because it can’t eat all of the sugars it has far more sweetness in it and we (initially) got a (low) 3.5% alcohol.”
Beers fall into two categories: ales and lagers. Ale yeast ferments at warm temperatures near the surface of the brew; lager yeast ferments cooler toward the bottom of the liquid-holding vessel. While European brewers had been brewing lagers for hundreds of years without understanding the process, in 1883, a scientist working at Carlsberg, in Copenhagen, isolated lager yeast for the first time. The find let brewers intentionally design lagers instead of leaving them up to chance.
In the 1980s a group of researchers realized that lager yeast results from the hybridization (or mating) of ale yeast and another, unidentified strain. It wasn’t until 2010, working out of his Patagonian hometown of Bariloche, literally almost tripped over the crucial clue.
“He was collecting yeast in a national park and there are some types of mushroom growing on those trees and one of them fell on the ground and he smelled alcohol. In his lab he discovered this is the long-lost mother of the lager yeast ,” says van Waesberghe in the video production, which Heineken commissioned and paid for and will run on Nat Geo’s website.
Though Heineken hired National Geographic to produce the branded content, Brendan Ripp, executive vice president of sales and partnerships at the media conglomerate, says the narrative shows symbiosis with its own mission to promote environmental appreciation and conservation.
“There was a real story to tell. When you can find a like-minded partner with a story that’s so good that Nat Geo consumers appreciate as much as the content we already produce on the editorial side of the house, that’s the branded content home run,” he says.
The partnership between Heineken and Libkind is proving a home run for Argentina’s brewing industry, too. Not only are a dozen of the nation’s craft brewers—already clustered in and around Barlioche—taking advantage of the ability to play with the new yeast strain, the region is hosting its first international brewing-yeast summit in October, and Heineken is helping to fund a yeast research lab, library and brewery for the community, slated to open late next year.
