From the Lab Bench to the Beer Glass

什么时候约翰谢泼德was asked to brew beer from wild yeast, he was skeptical. Humans, after all, have been brewing beer for millennia. If there were yeasts out there that could make a good pint, they would surely have been found years ago. But, it turns out, Sheppard proved himself wrong.

Sheppard是NC州立大学的生物处理教授，他在一个小型办公室和一个看起来在学术建筑的地下室的工业研究实验室之间分裂了他的时间。什么sheppard研究是啤酒。特别是，Sheppard的研究专注于车削水的艺术和科学，hops那麦芽and yeast into ales and lagers. He’s both a brewer and a scientist.

2014年春季，北卡罗来纳州科学节与罗利世界啤酒节重叠，节日的代表接近了Sheppard，了解酿造科学展览。他们建议谢泼德与NC国家生物学家合作Rob Dunnto find wild yeasts and use them to make beers that could be sampled by patrons at the World Beer Festival. It could be, they said, a tasty and accessible way to get people interested in the microbial biology of the natural world.

尽管如此，Sheppard的最初怀疑是良好的。

酵母是一种真菌 - 单细胞生物，单独地对肉眼看不见。并且存在数百种不同的物种，其中许多包括许多不同的菌株。但对于所有这些物种而言，只有两种通常用于制作啤酒。

更多酵母未被酿造使用的原因是因为啤酒制作酵母需要做两件事：它必须有效地（麦芽糖）并有效生产乙醇。大多数酵母也不能做到，那么均不那么少。

But Sheppard was willing to give it a shot, and so he reached out to Dunn. The biologist, in turn, reached out to the people in his research group to see if they had any ideas. One of those researchers was Anne Madden.

Madden is a postdoctoral microbiologist affiliated with both Dunn’s lab at NC State and Noah Fierer’s lab at the University of Colorado. In her official capacity as a postdoc, she studies the microorganisms of the “built environment” – particularly, how insects and other arthropods introduce microorganisms to homes, workplaces and other buildings. She is, in other words, an expert on the microscopic organisms that live on insects.

在加入邓恩实验室之前,马登是广泛的work on the microbial communities found on paper wasps. Because of that background, she knew that wasps are home to communities of yeasts, some of which are associated with winemaking. Maybe one of those yeasts would work for brewing, she thought.

Taking samples from wasps, Madden ultimately isolated a wild species of yeast that had never been used for commercial brewing and shared it with Sheppard.

Sheppard cultured the sample, growing the yeast until he had enough to try brewing with it. And the results were not what he expected.

“第一次批量生产了一个真正酸的啤酒，”Sheppard说。“但是当我们在世界啤酒节服务时，人们喜欢它。”而且，由于人们喜欢它，研究人员再次这样做了。

Last summer, Madden provided Sheppard with a second wild yeast sample – this time found on a species of bee, which turned out to be particularly apt.

“我们用第二个酵母酿造的啤酒包括味道的味道，如蜂蜜 - 非常甜味和芳香，”Sheppard说。“人们喜欢它，不敢相信啤酒中没有蜂蜜。

“So, I kept experimenting with different ale recipes, with promising results.”

发现了什么sheppard是，好的，有点令人惊叹。通过对酿造过程进行小调整，野生酵母产生了非常不同的风味化合物，称为酯。有些啤酒像酸甜一样品尝，有些像蜂蜜一样，有些像苹果酒一样。这些特征对于啤酒人来说非常有用。

“例如，酸贝斯越来越受欢迎，但它们对啤酒厂来说是棘手的 - 因为传统上，生产酸啤酒需要酿酒师与细菌一起使用，”Madden说。“这个过程意味着它可能需要六个月，甚至几年，产生酸啤酒。但我们的酵母菌株可以在五天内生产酸啤酒，他们不依赖细菌 - 消除污染其他啤酒的风险。“

Once they realized the potential of these wild yeasts, the researchers began collecting data on how these yeasts grow and precisely which esters they produce.

他们还与NC状态合作，提交发明披露，以保护其知识产权，并获得财政支持Chancellor’s Innovation Fund那which provides grants to faculty to help researchers move innovative concepts from the laboratory to the marketplace.

他们得到了资金，​​Sheppard现在正在努力制定酵母管理策略，以确保使用相同的配方的酿酒商一直生产具有相同风格概况的啤酒。

But this may be only the tip of the iceberg.

“We want to see how many of these [yeast] strains we can find,” Dunn says. “Are tens of new and useful strains lurking out there? Hundreds? Thousands? We’ll be figuring out the best ways to get these new strains, be they few or thousands, to the folks who can use them.”

And who could use them? You’d be surprised. Fermentation plays a role in making everything from sauerkraut and kimchi to chocolate and coffee.

谢泼德说，“将这种方法应用于其他产品的关键即将到来，以战略性的方式确定哪些微生物能够使用哪种食品生产过程。”

这肯定是一个复杂的过程。但邓恩并没有被吓倒。

“Personally, I want to devote most of the new work that happens in my lab to projects in which we attempt to find new values in the biodiversity around us every day,” Dunn says. “That will include more yeast work, but also work on new biofuel organisms, new antibiotics, new stimulants akin to caffeine and more. I’ve spent my career telling people nature is of value; now I want to spend the next decade putting my work where my mouth is.”