Travels with Barley (18 page)

Woodland Hills, Calif.
—Perhaps you have lived your life, as I had, unaware of international beer yeast smuggling rings. You probably didn't know, either, that beer yeast rustlers were ubiquitously afoot in the land.

But they're out there all right and all yeast is fair game. They have kits and they have knowledge—and they know how to clone. Actually, the correct term is clone-purify. But we'll get to that later.

Now, that beer yeast is the object of any intrigue whatsoever seems, on the face of it, curious considering that it is a microscopic, single-cell, potato-shaped fungus that sells, in dry form, for as little as 50 cents per half-ounce packet. With five of those you can make five gallons of homebrew (about fifty-three 12-ounce bottles). For that $2.50 investment, you get a slurry of powdery yeast comprised of about 250
billion
individual cells, making a single cell of beer yeast one of the great bargains on the planet.

However, the intrigue over such a seemingly lowly thing seems less curious when you spend time among the Yeast People. Among the Yeast People, there is nothing simple or ordinary about beer yeast. It is beautiful, glorious, mysterious, magical, sexy, and, of course, to them, the single most important ingredient in beer. Its historical and mystical name is God Is Good. For without beer yeast—a voracious feeder and a feral and potent multiplier—beer would not ferment and thus would lack that salutary taste-and mood-enhancer called alcohol.

But what really drives the passion of the Yeast People, whose ranks are formed by madly passionate homebrewers and madly passionate craft brewers, is the incalculable prospect that different strains of beer yeast bring to beer's flavor. That yeast affects beer flavor and character in a macro way has long been known.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
, more commonly known as ale yeast, and
Saccharomyces uvarum
, more commonly known as lager yeast, form the microbiological fault line of the world's great beer taste divide. One produces the earthy-warm flavor of ale, the other the smooth-cool flavor of lager. This more or less comes down to a function of how, and how effectively, the two strains feed.

This macro knowledge, however, has been supplemented of late with a vast cache of micro knowledge of how the lowly yeast does its thing, and to what effect. Yeast dances through thirteen steps en route to devouring malt sugars and throwing off alcohol (and carbon dioxide) as a by-product. In between, a lot can (and does) happen. Only recently, for example, scientists, using gas chromatographs attached to sniff ports manned by trained human nosers, discovered that yeast reactions account for dozens of flavors and odors, some previously unknown, some that were thought to be the result of other beer components. They have isolated these in such intricate ways that you can, if you care to, brew to achieve these flavors and odors, assuming you observe certain intricacies of application.

If you are a lager maker like Dixie Brewing Co., a New Orleans brewer that has used the same yeast strain since it opened in 1907, this doesn't concern you except, perhaps, as a matter of interesting arcana. If, however, you are a craft brewer seeking to make new beers with distinctive signatures, this interests you greatly. Likewise, you care if you are a homebrewer out to make a beer that tastes like, for example, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale; or out to make some exotic beer style like a Baltic porter; or out to make a beer that crosses so many beer style boundaries that you're certain it has never been made before on earth.

What else interests you, especially if you are that kind of home-brewer, is the fact that of a few hundred recognized beer yeast strains in the world, only about 100 are available commercially in the U.S., principally through two for-profit yeast labs, Wyeast Laboratories in Odell, Oregon, and White Labs in San Diego. That number in reality may be somewhat less; the two companies offer about fifty strains each but some may be the same yeast sold under different names. Still, that's a lot more than were available when President Jimmy Carter, homebrewers' all-time favorite politician, signed a law back in 1979 legalizing homebrewing at the federal level and opening the way for the states to do the same. Back then, homebrewers were pretty much stuck brewing with baker's yeast unless they were willing to write off to England to mail-order a few measly strains of ale yeast.

But if you
are
one of those madly passionate homebrewers among the nation's estimated two million beer-making hobbyists, the ability to get your hands on close to 100 beer yeast strains—strains that anybody else can buy—is simply not good enough. Propelled by the maddening theory that, if you just had the yeast, you could make Sam Adams as well as Boston Beer does, or you could make some highly exotic beer that could change your brewing life, you want them
all
.

And this, if you believe the committed among the yeast-rustling community, can pretty much be done.

Upon the advice of Randy Mosher, the affable Chicago Beer Geek I'd met at a homebrew contest in Houston, I took time from the quest to find the Perfect Beer Joint and flew out to Los Angeles to meet Maribeth Raines-Casselman. Mosher told me that not only was Maribeth one of the nation's acknowledged beer yeast experts but that she had probably done more to advance the odd science of yeast rustling than any other person in America.

Yeast rustling, unlike the variety practiced on cattle, is not to anyone's knowledge illegal and thus far nobody has sued anybody over it. Modern beer yeasts have evolved from wild, naturally occurring strains; they are not genetically engineered, so they are not strictly speaking patentable (though people have patented industrial
processes
that involve yeast, but not thus far in the brewing industry).

But that's not the same as saying the issue isn't of concern. Most commercial breweries have yeast they consider to be proprietary and they don't (usually) hand it out or want it falling into outside hands. The big lager makers like Anheuser-Busch have made significant investments in high-tech labs and spend millions of dollars a year to propagate their yeast and keep it pure. (As a cost per bottle of beer, yeast is practically nothing; the brewing cycle spins off five to six times more yeast than brewers ever need to make future beer, and brewers face a disposal problem with the excess.)

Many big breweries like Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, and Coors have used the same yeast strains forever—strains, they say, brought to America by their founders. They refresh them regularly by recloning from pure cultures they have set aside in what are called slants—sealed test tubes, stored in freezers, with a sterile medium that guards against contaminants. But most of the hundreds of new craft brew and brewpub start-ups of the past two decades had no yeast to call their own, nor the money or space to run internal yeast labs. Hence both Wyeast and White Labs sprang to life to help them develop, perfect, push, and preserve their yeast strains. Some small brewers who did have their own yeast admitted their murky origins. I had at least two craft brewers tell me that they got their yeast strains from people inside other breweries who smuggled them out. I had craft brewers tell me they obtained samples of another brewery's yeast and allowed it to mutate into a strain that they now call proprietary. (Yeast can mutate in as few as ten generations.) Now and then, a craft brewer will openly share its yeast, only asking that those who use it give the original owner some credit in the marketing fine print. But most craft brew strains managed by the yeast labs are protected by “no sharing” agreements that prohibit the labs from selling them, say, into the homebrew market, or giving them to other commercial brewers.

This is where the yeast rustlers come in.

I caught up with Maribeth, and her husband, Steve Casselman, in their modest ranch house in Woodland Hills, one of those sprawling, homogenized suburbs just northeast of Lost Angeles. “House” might be a bit of a misnomer. Maribeth and Steve are ardent homebrewers who own a popular commercial beer, which they send out to be contract-brewed, called Hollywood Blonde (it's an exotic, awardwinning American Kölsch, which is a type of ale known for its clean, lagerlike qualities). Their house and garage are totally given over to these pursuits. Seven refrigerators hold beer in various stages of production; beer kegs are everyplace, including one, with tap, out by the swimming pool; an enormous 50-gallon homebrewing apparatus stands in the driveway (the average amateur brews in a 5-gallon crock); a utility closet holds a beer-fermenting room; boxes of beer bottles waiting to be filled and bottling equipment crowd various nooks and crannies. And spare bedrooms have been commandeered and turned into labs full of test tubes, beakers, flasks, and microscopes where Maribeth conducts most of her yeast work.

You don't exactly have to have a Ph.D. to perfect the art of rustling up yeast cultures from other people's beers, or actual samples of their yeast, but Maribeth happens to have one anyway. A friendly, bigboned Midwesterner with a quick wit and a hearty laugh, she got a doctorate in biochemistry from Michigan State University back in the 1980s, where among her favorite memories was being able to buy Wiedemann's lager longnecks for five bucks a case. “That was the bomb,” she told me. (Now-defunct Wiedemann was a Kentucky brewer and another 1980s Lager Wars casualty.) After spending time on the faculty at UCLA doing cancer research, Maribeth moved to the private sector where she runs a research group for a nearby biotechnology concern called Biosource. There, she helps genetically engineer synthetic hormones and detection reagents that big pharmaceutical companies use in drug testing. There is a clear beer benefit to this job, since it gives Maribeth access to a high-tech liquid nitrogen refrigerator in which she can cryogenically store captured yeast (forever, in theory) in slants under mineral oil at minus 80 degrees Celsius.

I arrived on a late summer afternoon and it was 112 degrees Fahrenheit outside, a detail I learned from Steve Casselman as he came in from the garage, where some of the seven refrigerators reside, bearing big unmarked bottles of cold beer. Steve, a mirthful man with a boyish grin and huge enthusiasms, runs a business from home in the esoteric niche of reconfigurable computing (which Steve, if he were writing this, could explain to you). We sat at their dining room table and, while Steve poured the homebrew, Maribeth began to tell me about yeast. But first she diverted to the beer we were going to drink.

‘This is Dougweiser,” she said. “It's essentially a really strong Budweiser at 9 percent alcohol by volume. We made it with rice like they do. It's a pain in the ass unless you can get somebody to build you a $100 million plant. You boil up the rice till it gelatinizes and essentially becomes liquid starch. It's a mess to make.” (They named it for a friend and fellow homebrewer named Doug who was killed in an automobile accident on the way to a homebrew competition.)

I took a sip and it was potent and good—though not very much like Bud.

Maribeth also told me we would later be trying their take on a tripel, which is a Belgian-Dutch ale style that traditionally designated the strongest beer in the house. “Ours is a super-strong Belgian, probably 15 percent ABV,” she said. “So we call it SexTipel.” This, she explained, was a play on sextuple because “it's stronger than a tripel. And after you drink it you'll want to have sex but you'll probably tip over instead.”

This brought a howl of laughter from Steve though he'd no doubt heard this before. One thing I would learn about Maribeth and Steve, who are both forty-five years old; they really liked their beer and they really liked to laugh.

She then started to fill me in on why and whither the obsession with yeast.

In the beginning, Maribeth said, it was the dearth of authentic beer yeast that drove homebrewers in the early 1980s to take matters into their own hands. They could do this because of yeast's biology. As a single-cell organism, it does not need a mate to propagate; it divides, when it is fed and happy, as many as twenty times in its life cycle, spinning off buds that grow into identical daughter cells. Under the right conditions, the beer forms of
Saccharomyces
(a term literally meaning sugar fungus) do this rather rapidly and exponentially. Thus, even though you might need billions of yeast cells to ferment a 5-gallon bucket of wort into beer, you could start by isolating a single healthy yeast cell, throwing it into a sugar-rich, commercially available medium known as starter, and letting it do its thing. In three days or so, you can be riding herd on your own yeast ranch with billions and billions of cells. In the easiest of all worlds, somebody would actually give you an active, healthy sample of the yeast—people have passed on sourdough bread yeast like this and kept the recultured yeast alive for decades. But, absent a gift of yeast, there are other ways to get it.

One way is to simply find what are known as bottle-conditioned or cask-conditioned beers—usually, but not always, ales. Again, these are unpasteurized beers to which yeast has been added to the bottle or barrel after primary fermentation to boost both alcohol and carbonation levels. These beers thus contain live yeast. If you go down to the supermarket or the craft brew emporium and buy such a beer, whether a bottle or a whole kegful, it isn't particularly hard to swab a sample of this beer onto a slide, put it under a microscope, and find yeast—probably clusters of them. Maribeth said there is a mild amount of experience required in selecting the appropriate cell. She then showed me what she meant. On a slide under a microscope with various yeast blobs floating about, she looked for uniformity. “You probably wouldn't want that big fat one you see there. It might be bacteria or a mutation. And you wouldn't want those small ones either for the same reason.”