HAVE you ever wondered why some types of lagers taste different from others? The answer, it seems, has a lot to do with the yeast.
Lagers belong to two main families: the Saaz group such as Carlsberg, brewed in Denmark; and the Frohberg lagers that include Heineken and Oranjeboom from the Netherlands.
To find out whether there is a genetic difference between these families, Gavin Sherlock and Barbara Dunn of Stanford University, California, compared the genes of 17 lager yeast strains across the world dating from between 1883 and 1976.
It has long been thought that Saccharomyces pastorianus, the…
