Interesting genome sequencing of some yeasts

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
To the best of my own abilities and with very low volume fanfare, I have absorbed and processed the latest data from Langdon et al. and suregork in a new living permalink here (and it also includes a handful of other tweaks) -- for convenience the latest July-October 2019 genomic-related updates have been highlighted in purple:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16XRUloO3WXqH9Ixsf5vx2DIKDmrEQJ36tLRBmmya7Jo/edit?usp=sharing

This is a tool and labour of love, intended mostly for my own use, but if you like it that's cool too. The usual caveats apply... strains listed together are not necessarily exactly equivalent... however, you might perhaps find them "close enough, for most intents and purposes", which has always been my primary intent. If you don't like this or find it useful, ignore it. For those interested, from here on out I am going to attempt to maintain the link above as the final permanent link, as a living document, no longer just a snapshot in time, but continually being tweaked at least about once or twice per month or as necessary based on new inputs, which is how it's been going all year long since I started this in January 2019.

Cheers all and happy yeasting. :)

Dude I just realized how much I love this list. Nice work.
 
Excellent thread!

I have recently cottoned on to suregork's most recent findings and made a couple of postings under his latest blog post from October 2019:
http://beer.suregork.com/?p=4112

I found the observations regarding Frohberg and Saaz strains most interesting and noticed, amongst other things: in the 19th century, lager beers seem to have exhibited much lower apparent attenuation (AA) figures, and I was wondering whether this could be an indication for a much wider use of Saaz strains back then as many (but by no means all of them as I have learned since!!) are not capable of utilising maltotriose.

Ron Pattinson has collated a lot of data:

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2014/10/munich-winterbier-in-1843.html
Munich Winterbier: AA 49-68%, average value 61%

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2017/10/munich-export-1879-1899.html
Munich Export 1879-1899: AA 53-74%, average value 64%

http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2016/07/munich-helles-in-1902-and-2014.html
Munich Helles 1902: AA 66-76%, average value 72%, a bit higher already!

https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2008/06/salvator.html
Salvator-type Bock beers pre-1900: AA 45-66%, average value 57%

https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2008/06/bayerisches-lagerbier.html
A single dark Bavarian lagerbier (from 1865 or before): AA 46%.

Perhaps something changed "post-Hansen", and now practically no Saaz strains seem to be used?
 
An interesting thought. Analyses of a massive number of beers, from the 1860s to 1900, published by Wahl and Henius, show typical AA in the mid 60s to low 70s. North American beers do appear to come in a bit higher on average than continental beers, possibly because of the mashing methods employed (step infusion or double mash rather than decoction.) But these attenuation rates are all lower than what we might expect today. Their data on Danish beers are sadly deficient.
 
Malt has changed a lot in the past century, thanks to industrialization and modern agricultural techniques. One consequence of this is higher average AA. FYI even modern darker malts like Munich have lower attenuation than moder light malts.
 
Ha! And I was just now busy photographing all those pages... PITA! Thanks for providing that. I figured the nerds here would be interested. Pages 823-830 BTW.
Thanks for pointing me to those pages!

This particular tomb is nearly 1300 pages long, so that helps a lot!!

Malt has changed a lot in the past century, thanks to industrialization and modern agricultural techniques. One consequence of this is higher average AA. FYI even modern darker malts like Munich have lower attenuation than moder light malts.
I'm aware of that, thanks. It might still be worth considering whether yeast pre- and post-Hansen has been a contributing or perhaps important factor. Some AA figures in the 19th century were as low as 46%.
 
I'm aware of that, thanks. It might still be worth considering whether yeast pre- and post-Hansen has been a contributing or perhaps important factor. Some AA figures in the 19th century were as low as 46%.

Those would be typical values for spontaneous or semi-spontaneous fermentations. Let's not forget that yeast isolation and propagation techniques were developed and propagated (pun intended) in the course of the 19th Century and presumably not simultaneously across the world.
 
Those would be typical values for spontaneous or semi-spontaneous fermentations. Let's not forget that yeast isolation and propagation techniques were developed and propagated (pun intended) in the course of the 19th Century and presumably not simultaneously across the world.
These particularly low figures are from Bavaria, but definitely pre-Hansen's isolation techniques. See post #83 for sources.

I think we can relatively safely assume that many Bavarian brewers of the mid-19th century, having already worked with bottom-fermenting yeast for several centuries at this point, knew what they were doing and didn't rely on spontaneous fermentation.

(edited to make my point a bit clearer)
 
Last edited:
I noticed some Danstar Yeasts are identified on the ‘yeast wheel’ (Nottingham, Windsor, Munich, etc) but others aren’t (BRY97). Is ‘beer097’ BRY97?

Adjustments.jpg
 
Beer097, etc., are designations from one of the papers; BRY97 is originally the accession number from the Siebel yeast bank, so no.

BRY97 *was* up in the Mixed clade in the previous tree (with beer097 right where you note,) but is missing from the Oct 2019 version. So, hmm. Nothing I can find in comments on suregork's blog to indicate what happened. Where'd it go? Anybody?
20200206_202617.jpg
 
Last edited:
Different studies looked at different yeasts. There have been at least 4 or 5 recent studies that I know of. The last one, Langdon, didn't look at BRY-97. Many yeast strains have never been evaluated at all. And the "beer0xx" designations have no ties with the manufacturer's numberings, so no, beer097 is not BRY-97.
 
BRY97 *was* up in the Mixed clade in the previous tree (with beer097 right where you note,) but is missing from the Oct 2019 version. So, hmm. Nothing I can find in comments on suregork's blog to indicate what happened. Where'd it go?

A bunch of strains got left out of that update, I think partly just because the focus was on the newly released sequences and I guess he was just trying to reduce supercomputer time. But also in the past IIRC BRY-97 got left out of one run just because he hadn't noticed it was in the list of hundreds of sequences that were released in one go. So I don't think it's anything sinister.

But you do highlight an interesting part of the tree that I don't think people have looked at closely enough. Lallemand's work has BRY-97 along with Belle Saison (so 3711 and WLP545????) and their version of Conan being less rubbish than most cerevisae at biorelease of glycosides, I've found T-58 is active at converting hop flavours, WLP050 Tennessee Whisky has some fun esters. I keep meaning to have more of a play with yeast in that bit of the tree as I think they have a lot to offer modern style beers, but that potential is overlooked as they're not as sexy as some yeasts.
 
I see the strain VTT A-63015 cited a lot in brewing research. Is there a way to confirm which commercial strain this translates?
 
I see the strain VTT A-63015 cited a lot in brewing research. Is there a way to confirm which commercial strain this translates?
It's a lager strain from a Finnish brewery. It is quite similar to W34/70. The 63 in the beginning of the code means it came to VTT's culture collection in 1963.
 
I noticed some Danstar Yeasts are identified on the ‘yeast wheel’ (Nottingham, Windsor, Munich, etc) but others aren’t (BRY97). Is ‘beer097’ BRY97?

View attachment 665499

A bunch of strains got left out of that update, I think partly just because the focus was on the newly released sequences and I guess he was just trying to reduce supercomputer time. But also in the past IIRC BRY-97 got left out of one run just because he hadn't noticed it was in the list of hundreds of sequences that were released in one go. So I don't think it's anything sinister.

But you do highlight an interesting part of the tree that I don't think people have looked at closely enough. Lallemand's work has BRY-97 along with Belle Saison (so 3711 and WLP545????) and their version of Conan being less rubbish than most cerevisae at biorelease of glycosides, I've found T-58 is active at converting hop flavours, WLP050 Tennessee Whisky has some fun esters. I keep meaning to have more of a play with yeast in that bit of the tree as I think they have a lot to offer modern style beers, but that potential is overlooked as they're not as sexy as some yeasts.

I left out a couple of strains in the newest update because they were sequenced to a very low coverage and with quite short reads. In practice, this means the quality was quite bad and results could therefore be unreliable. If I remember correctly, BRY-97 was one of these strains. It's in the Mixed clade, but exact placement might not be completely accurate.
 
Has anyone looked at L17 or OYL-114, the purported Augustiner strains? Based on the way they’ve thrown sulfur and their fermentation character, I’m curious if they also fall into the 838 camp being cerevisiae strains.
 
Yeah interesting to note that two of the most popular commercial lager strains (at least in craft) here in the US, Augustiner and Andechs, aren’t listed or at least easily identified in these studies? Or did I miss something.
 
Has anyone looked at L17 or OYL-114, the purported Augustiner strains? Based on the way they’ve thrown sulfur and their fermentation character, I’m curious if they also fall into the 838 camp being cerevisiae strains.

I think it will take a while before we have sequencing data on that. It would be possible to do a PCR on the yeast to at least see if it contained eubayanus/pastorianus primers, but until someone either runs it through PCR, illumina or nanopore it's guesswork at this point.

and to top it off augustiner has a ton of yeast banks all probably with slightly different properties - wlp860, l17, oyl114, wyeast 2352PC, BSI augustiner...
 
Different studies looked at different yeasts. There have been at least 4 or 5 recent studies that I know of. The last one, Langdon, didn't look at BRY-97. Many yeast strains have never been evaluated at all. And the "beer0xx" designations have no ties with the manufacturer's numberings, so no, beer097 is not BRY-97.
Is there a functional difference between "2121" and "W34/70"? In your sheet you've stated W34/70 as being a high flocc'er (which fermentis also states), but Wyeast states 2124 as Low-Medium.

I'm trying to decide which of the two I should keep as my go-to lager yeast :confused:.
 
W-34/70 is the designation of a culture in the yeast bank at Weihenstephan (indicates isolate no. 34 of strain no. 70; there are also other isolates in their catalog.) It has been acquired and made available by many manufacturers, who maintain their cultures in their own yeast banks. Examples are WY 2124, WLP 830, and Saflager W-34/70. But as with any yeast from any source, they can change over time in the posession of each individual lab, and the particulars of each manufacturer's handling and production process can lead to selection favoring different performance characteristics. So there may be functional differences between various descendants of fhe original W-34/70, as received from different manufacturers. (Note the veritable zoo of "Chicos" out there.) I believe that the three I mentioned behave differently enough to matter to some brewers, though largely similar. See for yourself. (JFTR, though I've used the various 34/70s probably hundreds of times, I really don't care for any of them and don't use them anymore.)
 
Is there a functional difference between "2121" and "W34/70"? In your sheet you've stated W34/70 as being a high flocc'er (which fermentis also states), but Wyeast states 2124 as Low-Medium.

I'm trying to decide which of the two I should keep as my go-to lager yeast :confused:.

I haven’t used 2124 yet. My advice is to try them both and form your own opinion.
 
W-34/70 is the designation of a culture in the yeast bank at Weihenstephan (indicates isolate no. 34 of strain no. 70; there are also other isolates in their catalog.)

Other way round, W34 is the original, 34/70 is a specific isolate, as is W34/78. There's also W34/70-6.94 as an isolate of the isolate.

Weihenstephan strain names all begin with W, so for instance W68 is the most famous wheat beer strain that also has various "named" isolates like W68-6.94.
 
Other way round, W34 is the original, 34/70 is a specific isolate, as is W34/78. There's also W34/70-6.94 as an isolate of the isolate.

Weihenstephan strain names all begin with W, so for instance W68 is the most famous wheat beer strain that also has various "named" isolates like W68-6.94.

Is WB-06 from Weihenstephan? If so, for what beer style is it used?
 
Is WB-06 from Weihenstephan? If so, for what beer style is it used?

NO. WB-06 is actually Belgian in origin, and a diastaticus variant, would probably be okay in a saison, and is popular also for NEIPA, probably due to its poor flocculation mostly, but of course NEIPA people will tell you it's all about "biotransformation", if you believe in that sort of thing.
 
NO. WB-06 is actually Belgian in origin, and a diastaticus variant, would probably be okay in a saison, and is popular also for NEIPA, probably due to its poor flocculation mostly, but of course NEIPA people will tell you it's all about "biotransformation", if you believe in that sort of thing.

Since we would have not beer if yeast did not biotransform barley into alcohol, I don't think the fact of biotransformation is in much doubt. Whether it is useful for your beer is another matter.

Actually the biotransformation capability of WB-06 is a disaster for NEIPAs, as it's the Megatron of biotransformers, it trashes all hop flavour. But the likes of Treehouse appear to be using it or a close relative as a very small part of a yeast blend, <5% to contribute esters and other yeast flavours.

WB is just a Fermentis designation for wheat beer (even though it's part of the saison family and not a hefe yeast), nothing to to with Weihenstephan.
 
@dmtaylor a notification popped of on my phone randomly of your spreadsheet getting a bunch of attention on Reddit. Apparently I wasn't the only one stoked on it. Low key proud of you haha. It's a good spreadsheet. I reference it a lot.

Question to anyone: I really wanted to try A30 Corporate. I emailed Imperial and they said they didn't release it this year as homebrew packets. What's my next closest available to BRY-96? WY1217 won't be released until Q2.

Edit: WLP001?
 
Last edited:
@dmtaylor a notification popped of on my phone randomly of your spreadsheet getting a bunch of attention on Reddit. Apparently I wasn't the only one stoked on it. Low key proud of you haha. It's a good spreadsheet. I reference it a lot.

Question to anyone: I really wanted to try A30 Corporate. I emailed Imperial and they said they didn't release it this year as homebrew packets. What's my next closest available to BRY-96? WY1217 won't be released until Q2.

Edit: WLP001?

In my experience Corporate kinda sucked. It was a big diacetyl producer and took quite some time to clean up after itself. I reached out to the guys at Cloudburst and they even mentioned that it was a bit slow and you had to be careful.

Midwestern Ale (Bells) from The Yeast Bay and Old Newark Ale (Ballantine) from East Coast Yeast are way better options for something in the American Ale family tree. I would use them both over 001/1056 every time. They ferment faster and flocc better.
 
@dmtaylor a notification popped of on my phone randomly of your spreadsheet getting a bunch of attention on Reddit. Apparently I wasn't the only one stoked on it. Low key proud of you haha. It's a good spreadsheet. I reference it a lot.

Question to anyone: I really wanted to try A30 Corporate. I emailed Imperial and they said they didn't release it this year as homebrew packets. What's my next closest available to BRY-96? WY1217 won't be released until Q2.

Edit: WLP001?

Thanks Andre. I'm happy that even more people are finding it useful. And now I've received even more technical feedback and made a couple more tweaks based on others' knowledge and experience which is really great.

Sorry I haven't dug into all the Imperial yeasts yet to add to the table; Imperial is a project for some point in my future. That being said...

A30 Corporate is derived from good old BRY-96, "Chico". So WLP001 or 1056 would both be pretty darn good substitutes. I might steer away from US-05 because of its much higher attenuation, unless you like it more dry and higher alcohol than A30 would give. Some sources including a truly awesome genomic chart:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/imperial-yeast-a30-corporate.651586/
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/thread...f-white-labs-yeast.642831/page-2#post-8916547
Cheers.
 
Before we get too carried away with idea that WLP838 is an ale and Wyeast 1187 is a lager, we should perhaps also consider the idea that they've just got mixed up. It certainly happened in a couple of cases with the 1002 genomes from Strasbourg, it's tough managing this number of samples and mixups do happen. Remember this is provisional data at this stage.
And sure enough, White Labs have done some PCRs and growth tests : (h/t duelerx)
https://www.whitelabs.com/news-update-detail?id=105&type=NEWS
They have WLP029 and WLP800 as cerevisiae, and WLP051, WLP515 and WLP810 upwards (including WLP838) as lager (well, eubayanus/cerevisiae hybrids if we're being picky). WLP802 doesn't have a eubayanus band but doesn't grow at 37C either so who knows about that.
 
Guinness have done a detailed bit of stampcollecting on their current and archived yeasts, and compared them with yeasts from other classic Irish breweries like Smithwick's. The other Irish strains are all part of the Whitbread family, most closely related to Gallone's Beer066, which is possibly WLP041 Pacific ("Hale's/Gale's"). Whereas the Guinness yeasts are distinct and nothing to do with BE047 aka WLP004 Irish Ale!!!! Instead they're closer to BE052 which is WLP009 Australian and BE058 which may be WLP025 Southwold.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05587-3
1705268587852.png
 
That’s interesting. I’ve always enjoyed a good pint of Guinness, but can’t stand WLP004. Tried it a few times and just found it ‘metallic’ and prickly. Never got round to trying Wyeast’s offering.
 
Guinness have done a detailed bit of stamp collecting
And archived it as such. With about as much application. I’m not even convinced these characterisations should be published in serious science journals, tbh. Where’s the science? How do we apply this information? If not like a stamp?

Edit: I noticed they didn’t stop at the stamp collecting. Good on them. A bit more interesting than a stamp collection.
 
Last edited:
Whilst looking at the fermentation characteristics of "lager" yeast with a view to selecting one for high (1.053-1.074/13-18°P)/very-high (>1.074/18°P, they used 1.101/24°P in their tests) gravity brewing, this group from Jiangnan University in China found that some of them were hybrids of Saccharomyces kudriavzevii and S. cerevisiae - so similar hybrids to Wyeast 1214/WLP500/Abbaye.

The classical idea is that Group I(Saaz) lager yeasts are triploids with 2 eubayanus genomes and one cerevisiae whereas Group II (Frohberg) have two of each, but they found one ("BL25" from Germany) that was tetraploid despite appearing to belong to Group I by the Pham et al. PCR test. Likewise they had 42 strains that looked like Group II by the Pham et al PCR test, but 14 of the 42 were triploid.

"BL23" from China looked like a Saaz but had 37.44 % of its genome from S. kudriavzevii, "BL42" looked like a Frohberg but had 32.42 % from S. eubayanus and 12.8 % from S. uvarum; they had previously found that the Frohberg BL52 was a hybrid of S. cerevisiae and S. uvarum. They then used supposedly species-specific primers and had no hits for eubayanus on 3 of their 12 Saaz strains and 1 and an iffy one for kudriavzevii. Among their 42 Frohbergs they had 32 hits for S. kudriavzevii and 31 for S. eubayanus. Obviously the immediate question is how good are their PCR primers at only recognising one species, but one has to assume good faith by the previous workers who created them, in the absence of contrary evidence.

They were trying to breed yeast for very-high gravity brewing; they reckon that 1.101/24°P wort was equivalent in stress terms to 0.5M NaCl for lager yeast, . and 1.159/36°P was equivalent to 1.2M NaCl or 12 % ethanol. Although Frohberg strains are meant to be more robust than Saaz, they found that if anything the reverse was true for their high gravity fermentations as judged by cell growth but their attenuation was less and they produced more esters and fusel alcohols.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740002024000170
 
Back
Top