List matching wyeast/white labs strains to commercial breweries

[Boleslaus]

I'm sure I'm just not using the correct search terms but a forum search and google search turned up no results.

What I'm after is a list of 2206 = x brewery; 1318 = y brewery. This may not exist for every strain, but I know I have seen throughout various threads and sites info about which yeast strain is whose. Is there a central repository for this info?

 

[Robert65]

There are several popular lists that have been around for a while, all of which have been proven by all the genomic studies in the last couple of years to be mostly useless. Yeasts they say are the same aren't remotely related, have nothing to do with the alleged source, etc. There are clear identifications being made by the new research, but it's mostly not in such handy form yet. Things are up in the air.

 

[LLBeanJ]

http://mrmalty.com/white-labs.php
http://mrmalty.com/wyeast.php

 

[OnePlate]

http://beer.suregork.com/?p=3919 and http://beer.suregork.com/?p=4030

That's probably the best info out there right now.

 

[Robert65]

http://beer.suregork.com/?p=3919 and http://beer.suregork.com/?p=4030

That's probably the best info out there right now.

Yep. That's the best resource at the moment, but not in a convenient form. The Mr. Malty table has been pretty well debunked.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

What I'm after is a list of 2206 = x brewery; 1318 = y brewery. This may not exist for every strain, but I know I have seen throughout various threads and sites info about which yeast strain is whose. Is there a central repository for this info?

There's several problems with this. One is that yeast manufacturers can't say directly where a yeast comes from, as if they branded a yeast with "This is Heineken's yeast" then Heineken would expect a royalty fee, backed up by Very Expensive lawyers. In that case it's fairly easy as they can call it Dutch Lager yeast and there's not much doubt where it came from, but it gets really messy once you get to eg the British ale yeasts.

Traditionally British breweries (and a few other like Urquell) use(d) multi-strains which have very different behaviour to the sum of their parts, whereas homebrew companies tend to sell single strains. So even if you know for certain that a yeast came from brewery X, it's only part of the story because you have Laurel without Hardy or gin without tonic. You can see that most clearly with something like 1335 and WLP025, which are very different but which both allegedly came from Adnams - it looks like White Labs got the "flavour" half of what is now a 2-strain (but which originally had 6+ strains) and Wyeast got the "brewing performance" half. By themselves, neither will produce a beer like the original Adnams yeast, either flavour or attenuation will be missing.

Also in most cases the homebrew companies have not taken yeast direct from the source, it's come from the homebrew community where it may have spent some years being propagated with the attendant risks of mutation and labels getting mixed up. You can certainly see differences in the Chico and Conan strains from different labs, they behave differently. And just the act of harvesting yeast from bottles will inevitably select for eg less flocculant versions that haven't dropped out before packaging.

And that's before you get to the revelations from DNA sequencing which while perhaps not telling you too much about where things came from, have revealed that some "ale" yeasts are lager yeasts and vice versa, a number of British yeasts are in fact part of the saison family and so on.

So you'll see a lot of people pointing you to http://www.mrmalty.com/yeast.htm but despite Kristen's best efforts you have to take it with a large pinch of salt - or several sackloads of salt when it comes to the British strains.

dmtaylor of this parish has tried to bring together what's known about how different homebrew strains relate to each other (which is complicated enough and far from the X=Y that is traditionally spoken of) :
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...ETgOwH5BWx3bTqEt0kEpV-O5OM/edit#gid=243238826

 

[Boleslaus]

Yep. That's the best resource at the moment, but not in a convenient form. The Mr. Malty table has been pretty well debunked.

There's several problems with this. One is that yeast manufacturers can't say directly where a yeast comes from, as if they branded a yeast with "This is Heineken's yeast" then Heineken would expect a royalty fee, backed up by Very Expensive lawyers. In that case it's fairly easy as they can call it Dutch Lager yeast and there's not much doubt where it came from, but it gets really messy once you get to eg the British ale yeasts.

Traditionally British breweries (and a few other like Urquell) use(d) multi-strains which have very different behaviour to the sum of their parts, whereas homebrew companies tend to sell single strains. So even if you know for certain that a yeast came from brewery X, it's only part of the story because you have Laurel without Hardy or gin without tonic. You can see that most clearly with something like 1335 and WLP025, which are very different but which both allegedly came from Adnams - it looks like White Labs got the "flavour" half of what is now a 2-strain (but which originally had 6+ strains) and Wyeast got the "brewing performance" half. By themselves, neither will produce a beer like the original Adnams yeast, either flavour or attenuation will be missing.

Also in most cases the homebrew companies have not taken yeast direct from the source, it's come from the homebrew community where it may have spent some years being propagated with the attendant risks of mutation and labels getting mixed up. You can certainly see differences in the Chico and Conan strains from different labs, they behave differently. And just the act of harvesting yeast from bottles will inevitably select for eg less flocculant versions that haven't dropped out before packaging.

And that's before you get to the revelations from DNA sequencing which while perhaps not telling you too much about where things came from, have revealed that some "ale" yeasts are lager yeasts and vice versa, a number of British yeasts are in fact part of the saison family and so on.

So you'll see a lot of people pointing you to http://www.mrmalty.com/yeast.htm but despite Kristen's best efforts you have to take it with a large pinch of salt - or several sackloads of salt when it comes to the British strains.

dmtaylor of this parish has tried to bring together what's known about how different homebrew strains relate to each other (which is complicated enough and far from the X=Y that is traditionally spoken of) :
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...ETgOwH5BWx3bTqEt0kEpV-O5OM/edit#gid=243238826

Thanks for the responses everyone. Looks like I'm going down the yeasty rabbit hole. I'm actually planning to brew my IPA and split into several smaller batches to do side by side yeast comparisons. That yeast genotype data will be helpful in planning.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Thanks for the responses everyone. Looks like I'm going down the yeasty rabbit hole. I'm actually planning to brew my IPA and split into several smaller batches to do side by side yeast comparisons. That yeast genotype data will be helpful in planning.

Don't get too hung up on that as it doesn't always translate into brewing characteristics, in the same way that you are genetically almost equally related to your mother and father, but are very different to one of them in several important respects.

 

[bierhaus15]

The Mr. Malty page is still a decent resource for the sources of most the WY/WL strains, per how they were collected. However, given the sometimes dubious methods in which many of those cultures were acquired and how yeast change via process and time, it is foolish to think any commercial culture will give you the same result as the actual brewery yeast. Furthermore, UK yeast origins and evolution are so complicated that the list is really only useful for the most basic of connections; WY1968 will likely make a beer similar to Fullers.

The Gallone paper is also rather useless for most (home) brewing applications (with some exceptions), as none of the info really tells us how the yeasts behave, taste, ect, regardless of how similar they are genetically; are they 50% or 15% similar, what % of that similarity actually matters? Also, comparing US stored cultures to UK ones is largely moot, as a strain acquired from a bottle of UK beer in 1992 is not likely to share much similarity with the same strain used by a brewery in the UK in 2019.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

WY1968 will likely make a beer similar to Fullers.

Hmm - without the orangey thing then that's rather debatable.

are they 50% or 15% similar, what % of that similarity actually matters?

Actually the main Gallone diagram is very precise on scale, as it has a scale bar - "Scale bar, 0.005 substitutions per site", or 0.5% - on a genome of around 10 million "letters" that's about 50,000 mutations :

Confusingly although the scale bar is arranged horizontally it actually applies to the distance from the centre of the diagram - so the main group of British yeasts is about 1% different from each other - but that is still 100,000 mutations. We know that even a few mutations can make a big difference - such as S-33 being pretty much T-58 with the POF gene cassette knocked out.

Also, comparing US stored cultures to UK ones is largely moot, as a strain acquired from a bottle of UK beer in 1992 is not likely to share much similarity with the same strain used by a brewery in the UK in 2019.

Except for the fact that most major breweries have been storing their yeast in banks since the 1950s, so actually it won't have changed much since then, whereas the homebrew saves may have drifted considerably (as seems to have happened with most of the "Fullers" yeasts in N. America before they got banked Stateside).

 

[bierhaus15]

That is interesting about the scale, did not catch when I read through. Thanks. Still a lot of mutations though.

Except for the fact that most major breweries have been storing their yeast in banks since the 1950s, so actually it won't have changed much since then, whereas the homebrew saves may have drifted considerably (as seems to have happened with most of the "Fullers" yeasts in N. America before they got banked Stateside).

I was implying the US yeast labs that sell to home brewers largely obtained their cultures not from proper yeast labs like NCYC, but from home brewers who collected many of these yeasts in the early 1990's and then passed them off to the WY/WL, ect. Brewtek and Yeast Culture Kit are the sources for many of the UK and Belgian yeasts in the WL and WY catalogs. These were mostly home brewer (bottle) collected and stored yeast cultures and as such likely have little similarity to the original cultures maintained in the UK banks.