We were off last week as I embarked on a research project for an upcoming additional beer podcast tentatively named, “The State of the Beer.” For the first couple of shows I stopped at a bunch of different breweries between Delaware and Nevada during my #PintsAcrossAmerica tour. Traveling for beer is always something that gives me a little bit of pleasure. The idea of just driving until you find a brewery, having a pint and moving on appeals to the would-be wanderer in me.

If you would like to follow along on my beer journey, you can check out my Untappd account, but I’ll be posting stories of the individual breweries as the weeks progress. If you’re at all interested in seeing what traveling for beer is like, or just want to stay up to date on all the beer happenings we think are interesting at SOTB, you can subscribe to my monthly email list.

Historic Yeast and Yeast History

There’s little that captures the imagination of craft beer enthusiasts, and especially homebrewers, like discovering old timey ingredients. Recently some yeast was collected from a Civil War-era fort. Although they collected a bunch, finding usable yeast was a little more difficult, but Oozlefinch Brewing got it done.

A 200-year-old yeast strain is being used to make a new beer at Oozlefinch

FORT MONROE Most people don’t look for beer ingredients in the nearly 200-year-old mess chest of a Union general. But that’s exactly where Rachel Edwards, assistant brewer at The Oozlefinch Craft Brewery, found yeast for her latest creation – an English Bitter. She swabbed about 20 different places on Gen.

 

 

Speaking of hard-to-find yeast strains, this article talks about the origins of yeast. It looks as if it originated in China and spread out from there along the wind. The coolest part about that is that it means that fruit started turning into alcohol as different yeasts reached different regions. It probably has a lot to do with differing tastes throughout the drinking world.

Genome evolution across 1,011 Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates

Altmetric: 337 More detail Article | Open Received: Accepted: Published: Large-scale population genomic surveys are essential to explore the phenotypic diversity of natural populations. Here we report the whole-genome sequencing and phenotyping of 1,011 Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates, which together provide an accurate evolutionary picture of the genomic variants that shape the species-wide phenotypic landscape of this yeast.

 

Traveling for Beer This Summer

There almost certainly is a beer pairing column in my future, but for now here is someone else’s take. Summer is about lighter beers and more of them, generally, but don’t overlook red and scotch ales as well as porters as they’re available because they really can complement the kinds of foods one eats during the summer.

Craft Beers to Feed Your New England Seafood Obsession

The winters in New England seem to last forever, with the first flakes likely to fall somewhere around Halloween. The days get shorter and colder, and the entirety of the sun’s showing for a day takes place in bet...