Mohammed Tawfeeq, from the Kevin Verstrepen lab at the University of Leuven, will be giving a talk about his research on kveik.
Mohammed is a student at the lab which published the Gallone 2016 paper, showing that brewer’s yeast is divided into two major genetic families, called Beer 1 and Beer 2.
The talk will begin at 1830 European time.
Traditional beers as a source of new yeast biodiversity
While the domestication and divergence of the industrial Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeasts has been heavily studied, little is known about the evolutionary history and the characteristics of the traditional farmhouse beer yeast cultures of Norway, the Baltics, and Russia. In this project, 26 different farmhouse yeast cultures of a total of 1250 strains were characterized and compared to typical ale yeast strains. A representative set of 186 strains was selected and used for phenotypic screens. These strains were characterized and compared with laboratory and industrial strains of Saccharomyces. The phenotypic characterization included fermentation of the variants in around 400 bottles. The fermentation was done in common industrial conditions and kveik conditions. The fermentation performance, as well as its metabolites and the tolerance toward different stressors (temperature, ethanol, sugar and salt) were tested to investigate the diversity of the farmhouse yeasts.