"Fast" lager is nothing new.
I have to disagree. There are some lager strains that clean up quickly and others that don't. But this is in respect to producing great tasting beer. However you can certainly produce a passable lager 'fast'.
Well, the "fast" procedure was the "winter" or "lager" beer process going back centuries; of course with mixed strains originally. The "summer" or "March (Märzen)" process intentionally lowered the temperature before full attenuation to slow fermentation so that fresh beer would continue to come into supply during the months when brewing was not possible, especially after the 1553 Bavarian prohibition of Summer brewing. The wide distribution of ice by rail rendered this effectively unnecessary, so that in 1850 the Bavarian law was rescinded, and by the 1870s fully modern mechanical refrigeration plants made "winter/lager" beer possible anytime, anywhere, on any scale. I suppose that, as all culture yeasts are the product of intentional selection, the differences you point out that we see in lager yeasts today might trace back to those strains suited to either "lager" or "March" beers, and eventually selected as single-cell cultures by breweries that, for whatever reason, did or did not choose (at the cost of labor, energy, time and tank capacity) to use the longer fermentation and lagering schedules no longer seasonally necessitated. Economy has favored something like the old winter process, which homebrewers have mistaken for new, when its roots really predate the Märzen process.
Topic: Saflager 34/70 lag time (Read 4712 times)
