ZEBEIYU Swing Top Glass Bottles 4 oz With Flip Airtight Lids for Home Brewing, Beverages, Oil, Vinegar, Water, Soda, Kefir, Limoncello, Homemade liquor, vanilla（10 Pack
$17.00 (as of 30/11/2024 00:34 GMT -03:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)6–8 minutos
Where does kveik come from?
kveik is a yeast. That is, a yeast that has been reused by humans for so long that it has transformed into something that works better for humans and is adapted to the environment that humans have created for it. So kveik is definitely not wild yeast. It’s brewer’s yeast. But what kind of fermented beer?
The results were quite surprising: kveik belongs to beer 1. This is the group that has Belgian/German strains on one side and British/American strains on the other. Kveik fits close to the root of Beer 1. You see the tree above: the basic division within Beer 1 is between US/UK/Bel/Ger yeasts on one side and kveik + 3 non-kveik yeasts on the other. (More on those below.)
So what does this tell us?
Obviously, kveik shares an origin with the largest group of commercial beer strains. Beer 1 almost certainly started out in continental Europe, and some of the varieties were transported across the channel to the UK, while others reached Norway. How and when this happened we don’t know, but it has clearly been a long time ago. Gallone et al calculated that the yeasts in Beer 1 began to diverge around 1600 CE, but I personally consider this a low estimate. This probably couldn’t have happened much more recently, but it could very well have happened earlier. So I think we can say with confidence that kveik separated from the rest of beer 1 centuries ago.
From the genetic signature of kveik (high heterozygosity), the researchers conclude that it is likely a mosaic (a kind of hybrid). This needs to be explained, I think. Wild yeast can produce offspring by having two parents mate to produce a child, mixing their DNA like humans do. They can also produce new cells by simply “budding”, letting a new cell form from an existing cell. Sprouting is something humans (fortunately!) cannot do. Brewer’s yeast can generally only reproduce by budding, but there are some exceptions.
The family tree with the two halves of the genome (haplotypes) entered separately. Look for the two sets of strain names in red around the outermost circle.
What researchers think is that at some point in the evolution of brewer’s yeast, a Beer 1 yeast mated with some other yeast outside of Beer 1, and that all kveiks descended from that child. They used an algorithm to divide the genome into genes that they think came from one parent, and those that they think came from the other. Making the tree again, but putting the two halves of the genomes into it separately, half ends up in the same place in Beer 1, while the other ends up in a sort of no man’s land of nowhere near anything. (See the two groups of red names in the diagram above.)
The researchers think this means kveik was formed by a parent from the beginning of Beer 1 mating with wild yeast. This is not a firm research conclusion, however, just what seems most likely from the available data. Since all six kveiks show the same signature, this hybridization probably happened a long time ago. Whether it happened on the mainland or in Norway, we have no idea.
(This hybridization event, by the way, if it happened, is similar to the lager yeast formed, by mating normal brewer’s yeast with a cold-tolerant wild yeast of a different species. In the case of kveik, both parents were Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but from very different populations within the species.)
But what about those three non-kveik yeasts that are your closest neighbors? These are three hefeweizen yeasts, intriguingly. Unfortunately, this result is likely because they are both mosaics (hybrids within the species) and this similarity is what causes them to group together rather than any historical relationship. Probably. It’s a tempting fact, though, that the two most aromatic types of brewer’s yeast end up right next to each other. (I’m not counting Brettanomyces, because it’s a completely different genus, species group.)
One thing reviewers questioned was whether the kveik could be sourdough bread instead of real farm sourdough, since sahti and Gotlandsdricke are all using sourdough bread. Researchers took fingerprints from Norwegian baker’s yeast Idun Blå, and it ended up in a completely different place on the tree. so kveik is definitely not related to Idun Blå.
To summarize, kveik is definitely domesticated brewer’s yeast, relatively close to continental brewer’s yeast. It is likely a hybrid between them and a wild yeast that has been domesticated over the centuries.
The big lesson we learned from the 2016 Gallone et al paper was that most brewers’ yeast are related, which shows that properly domesticated yeast must have been a valuable thing that brewers took good care of and shared with each other. This is how a single family of yeast managed to spread from Belgium and Germany to the UK and from the UK to the US. Other similar family tree research projects have found similar results, so there is every reason to believe this is correct.
This article makes this even more clear. Even in western Norway it turns out that brewers still use descendants of this same Beer 1 family. The fact that all the kveiks, from Hardanger in the south to Sykkylven in the north, are related to each other shows that the brewers shared their yeast and also that they took a lot Be careful to preserve your domesticated yeast. One also gets the impression that there weren’t many options: this single type of yeast was apparently preferred over all the alternatives. So maybe yeast domestication didn’t happen as often?
It is worth repeating that the only non-Norwegian agricultural yeast included (#16 Simonaitis, from Lithuania) is not related to kveiks. Therefore, there are agricultural yeasts that are not kveik. This brings us to the questions that are still open. We now collect agricultural yeast from eastern Norway, plus Lithuania, Latvia and Russia. Where do these fit in? Are eastern farm yeasts a separate group that ferments hot and fast? Is it eastern Norwegian kveik farm yeast, or something else? We don’t know yet.
But since two of the six known Lithuanian yeasts belong to completely different species, my guess is that the non-kveiks don’t belong to a single family. But we won’t know for sure until researchers work a little harder.
