“It will take a longer time to scale, but the broader beer industry is going to change,” he says. Marshall says major beer distributors are still unsure whether consumers will be receptive to the concept of GMO yeast and would want to know whether GMO skepticism from the 1990s and early 2000s has dissipated.ĭenby says he’s confident the biggest beer makers will eventually, like craft brewers, be unable to resist the creative potential and efficiency offered by engineered yeast. Lagunitas offers beers made with Berkeley strains in its taproom, including the Martial Martian Express that features “Uncanny Pineapple” flavors, but you won’t find any in grocery stores. “I don’t know who it’s going to be, but once they do I think it’s going to become commonplace.” “Somebody is going to jump in, and we are kind of standing on the precipice of that,” he says. Marshall, of Lagunitas-a craft beer powerhouse now owned by brewing giant Heineken-think’s it’s only a matter of time. Major beer companies have been testing the startup’s yeasts, cofounder Denby says, although he declines to name them. Craft brewing makes up only one-quarter of the US beer market. Berkeley created its Tropics strain by modifying a yeast commonly used for hazy IPAs to produce the enzyme.Īlthough a fixture in craft brewing, to really hit the big time Berkeley Yeast will have to win over the largest multinational beer corporations such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and Heineken. One example is the enzyme carbon-sulfur-lyase, which takes flavorless molecules present in malt and hops and frees flavorful components called thiols that in beer taste like tropical fruit. The feedback led Berkeley to focus on strains that improve efficiency, such as by removing diacetyl, or enhance natural hop flavors by adding specific compounds or enzymes. Denby and his cofounders interviewed more than 100 brewers to ask what the yeast strain of their dreams would do and found there wasn’t actually much interest in eliminating hops altogether, although some brewers wanted to reduce hop usage a little for cost reasons. This is the Beyond Meat of beer,” Jeremy Marshall, Lagunitas head brewmaster, recalls.) Berkeley Yeast quickly pivoted. (Some hop farmers are still on edge: “One guy stood up at a hop conference this year and said, ‘We don’t like these yeasts, because these yeasts can make hop flavors. “Early on, we had hop farmers calling us saying, ‘Crap, are you going to not use hops anymore?’” says Bryan Donaldson, brewing innovation manager at Lagunitas and a coauthor on the 2018 paper. They feared engineered yeast could end a farming tradition and hollow out the soul of brewing, a dance of microorganisms, farmers, brewers, and hops stretching back to the 11th century.ĭenby declines to talk on the record about the antagonism, which caught the company by surprise, but news of the provocative idea swept through the industry. While the startup cofounders considered hoppy-tasting but hop-free beer potentially beneficial to brewers and the environment- as Denby said in a New York Times story after the paper was published-some hop farmers felt threatened. They founded Berkeley Yeast in 2017 with fellow biologist Nick Harris. “If I can get a yeast just to make parts per billion of these flavor compounds during an otherwise normal beer fermentation process,” he recalls thinking, “we could reduce the amount of natural resources that goes into the brewing process.”ĭenby started exploring that idea with labmate Rachel Li, who turned the idea of yeast that makes hop flavors into her doctoral thesis. He began to imagine yeast strains engineered to produce the flavors hops add to beer, potentially removing the need for hops altogether. “That was the light bulb for me,” Denby says. Discovering that hops were by far the most expensive part of home brewing inspired him to think about connecting his hobby and day job. It was the mid-2010s, and UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Charles Denby was using it to learn home brewing on weekends while working on biofuels in a yeast engineering lab during the week. The startup originated-predictably-in a garage.
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