[tommymorris]

Well, Chris Large responded to the message that I sent to Maitreya, which humbles me because I am just a lowly amateur brewing scientist. There is new information.  To my chagrin, it appears that Y-7407 is a indeed a lager strain, at least genetically.  Secondly, the culture is a tetraploid (4 sets of chromosomes), not a diploid as originally claimed in Dunn and Sherlock's publication.  However, the most interesting part is that they are in touch with the Lallemand scientist who knows the history of BRY-96 and BRY-97 (Lallemand purchased the Siebel Institute several years ago).  It appears that their first sequence of BRY-97 may have been of a contaminant. However, they are currently sequencing a new culture from the original deposit of BRY-97 and it appears to align with Wyeast 1056.  From what I am led to believe, BRY-97 is an isolate from a brewery that acquired BRY-96 from Siebel that is superior to the original.  I do not know about you, but this information unbelievably cool to me. We are looking at brewing history through the lense of genetics.

I guess that the lesson to be learned here is that cultures will adapt to their environment.   I have seen that play out in my sourdough culture.  It was all over the place when I first started to make sourdough.  Now, it is developing into a more reliable culture.  In my humble opinion, every brewer should maintain a sourdough culture and bake sourdough bread.  It will give him/her a greater understanding of how the pure brewing cultures we enjoy today evolved.

By the way, here is a photo my gloved hand holding a Siebel culture from a few years ago.  If one Googles the address on the slant (6100 Royalmount, Montreal, Canada), one will discover that it is the Lallemand campus in Canada.

That bit about Bry-97 and Bry-96 being so closely related is very interesting. From my hobbiest perspective that makes sense as they make similar beers.  Except, I have never had peach esters with Bry-97.

[BrewBama]

That bit about Bry-97 and Bry-96 being so closely related is very interesting. From my hobbiest perspective that makes sense as they make similar beers.  Except, I have never had peach esters with Bry-97.

+1

[Saccharomyces]

That bit about Bry-97 and Bry-96 being so closely related is very interesting. From my hobbiest perspective that makes sense as they make similar beers.  Except, I have never had peach esters with Bry-97.

Well, it adds credence to my assertion that BRY-97 is Anchor's ale strain.  Anchor started to brew Liberty ale in 1975.  Where did they acquire their ale strain?  We know that the steam strain was acquired from Wallerstein labs in 1974 from an interview their head brewer gave.   Before that date, Anchor used yeast from other breweries.  The question is did Anchor acquire BRY-96 from Siebel, use it, and then attempt to bank it in Siebel's culture collection?  Here's clue: https://www.facebook.com/anchorbrewing/videos/liberty-ale-open-fermentation/1296799260404253/   That looks like BRY-97 in action.  I am making a big assumption that the use of open fermenters and top-cropping is the selective pressure that created BRY-97 from BRY-96.  Almost everyone else is using BRY-96 or one of its descendants in conical fermenters.  That practice is going to select for other characteristics.

With that being said, I would like to run an experiment with you guys where were we attempt to force a non-strong top cropping yeast strain to become a strong top-cropping strain via selective pressure. To do that, we would have to serially repitch yeast that was cropped from the top. Most modern ale strains have been conditioned to work in conical fermenters, but there are still cells that floc to the top.  The trick is to select these cells from the other cells.

I have learned a lot about cultures from making sourdough bread (if one has to attempted to make sourdough, it definitely appeals to the hardcore all-grain brewer).  I started my culture with 100ml of pineapple juice and 50g of organic whole wheat flour.  I stepped it up, but I was not getting the rise I wanted from the culture because it was mostly lactic and acetic bacteria. I decided to start taking two tablespoons of starter and using it to innoculate 100grams of organic whole wheat mixed into 100ml of filtered water every 12 hours.  By discarding all but two tablespoons of the culture every time I propagated it, I reduced the culture to the organisms that could reproduce significantly in 12 hours, which basically eliminated all of the weak wild yeast strains.  Now, my sourdough starter will at least double after feeding it after removing what I plan to use to make bread and placing it immediately back in the refrigerator.  It is the craziest thing to see a sourdough starter double in the refrigerator.  There are definitely cold tolerant wild strains of Saccharomyces as well as wild yeast strains from a different genus.  One of these days, I am going to plate my sourdough culture for singles.

[Saccharomyces]

Well, the plot thickens day by day.  I contacted Siebel the other day as to why they removed the old list of cultures that they provided on slant. Well, I learned that major things are on the horizon. It appears that Lallemand is gearing up to provide a host of new yeast services.  While most of these services are out the question for most amateur brewers due to cost, for guys like me who are also amateur brewing scientists with little to no bounds, it is welcome news.  Lallemand has the resources to propel craft brewing and amateur brewing to new highs and they appear to be eager to play in this space.

With that said, they were interested in talking to me because I have acquired strains from Siebel in the past (I receive periodic messages from Siebel and Lallemand).  For me, the most interesting new information is that instead of sending me the old strain accession number list with brewing descriptions as I had requested, they sent me a spread sheet that among other things allows the reader to ascertain when a yeast culture was first recorded in Siebel bank.   I do not know how hold it is, but BRY-96 has a "reception" date of 4/1/1967.  That predates the G.W. Lange's deposits in the ARS NRRL.  I am assuming that that means that Siebel has been in possession of the culture since at least 1967 (BRY-96 was labeled as being from a former brewery on the East Coast in the old Siebel culture description).  If we look at Ballantine's history, we see that 1967 was tumultuous year, a strike followed by an anti-trust suit against big lager brewers for attempting to destroy their business (https://sites.google.com/site/pballantineandsons/ballantinetimeline2).  Needless to say, banking their culture would be insurance if they had to start all over.  I am more convinced than ever that BRY-96 is a Ballantine isolate.  Now, the question is what isolate?  What is interesting is that the spread sheet labels BRY-96's fermentation progress as slow.  That matches BRY-97 more than Wyeast 1056, WLP001, US-05, and Chico from the bottle.  Now, the question is, did Sierra Nevada change how the culture behaves via selective pressure by cropping from conical fermentation vessels?  Man, we are in the golden age of brewing yeast.  Between genetic sequencing and the culture collections looking to get into the game, what we see today is for what I have been waiting for almost thirty years.

[tommymorris]

Well, the plot thickens day by day.  I contacted Siebel the other day as to why they removed the old list of cultures that they provided on slant. Well, I learned that major things are on the horizon. It appears that Lallemand is gearing up to provide a host of new yeast services.  While most of these services are out the question for most amateur brewers due to cost, for guys like me who are also amateur brewing scientists with little to no bounds, it is welcome news.  Lallemand has the resources to propel craft brewing and amateur brewing to new highs and they appear to be eager to play in this space.

With that said, they were interested in talking to me because I have acquired strains from Siebel in the past (I receive periodic messages from Siebel and Lallemand).  For me, the most interesting new information is that instead of sending me the old strain accession number list with brewing descriptions as I had requested, they sent me a spread sheet that among other things allows the reader to ascertain when a yeast culture was first recorded in Siebel bank.   I do not know how hold it is, but BRY-96 has a "reception" date of 4/1/1967.  That predates the G.W. Lange's deposits in the ARS NRRL.  I am assuming that that means that Siebel has been in possession of the culture since at least 1967 (BRY-96 was labeled as being from a former brewery on the East Coast in the old Siebel culture description).  If we look at Ballantine's history, we see that 1967 was tumultuous year, a strike followed by an anti-trust suit against big lager brewers for attempting to destroy their business (https://sites.google.com/site/pballantineandsons/ballantinetimeline2).  Needless to say, banking their culture would be insurance if they had to start all over.  I am more convinced than ever that BRY-96 is a Ballantine isolate.  Now, the question is what isolate?  What is interesting is that the spread sheet labels BRY-96's fermentation progress as slow.  That matches BRY-97 more than Wyeast 1056, WLP001, US-05, and Chico from the bottle.  Now, the question is, did Sierra Nevada change how the culture behaves via selective pressure by cropping from conical fermentation vessels?  Man, we are in the golden age of brewing yeast.  Between genetic sequencing and the culture collections looking to get into the game, what we see today is for what I have been waiting for almost thirty years.

That’s a very interesting timeline. I had never heard of a Ballantine until reading about them on forums. My dad drank Miller High Life. Now I see the Ballantine beers lasted until well past the year 2000.

You say the spreadsheet talks about BRY-96. Does it mention BRY-97? What does it say about BRY-97?

[Saccharomyces]

Like a lot of lager brands, Ballantine was Ballantine in name only post the move to Narragansett in Cranston, RI. Falstaff purchased the Ballantine brand and moved production to Narragansett in 1972.  That is when the Ballantine complex in Newark, NJ was shuttered. Pabst acquired Ballantine when they acquired Falstaff.

BRY-97 was never on Siebel’s List of cultures. There may have been a culture 97 at one time, but it was not the same as what is sold today. According to Tobias Fischborn (a senior research scientist at Lallemand), the name BRY-97 was created by Lallemand for an isolate of BRY-96 with better fermentation characteristics.

[YeastIsInteresting]

I have it on good authority:

"BRY97 is the dried form of the BRY96 strain from the Siebel Institute. It was deposited by Narragansett Brewing Co (Rhode Island) in 1967, so been around a while. The BRY96 was then supplied to Sierra Nevada in the 1980s, whether it was the original strain that became Chico...not sure."

Don't know if that helps. 

[Saccharomyces]

I have it on good authority:

"BRY97 is the dried form of the BRY96 strain from the Siebel Institute. It was deposited by Narragansett Brewing Co (Rhode Island) in 1967, so been around a while. The BRY96 was then supplied to Sierra Nevada in the 1980s, whether it was the original strain that became Chico...not sure."

Don't know if that helps.

I brought up the Narragansett link in this post: https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=35905.msg449743#msg449743

With new genetic information coming out about the parent of Chico; namely, Siebel BRY-96 (Tobias Fischborn let the cat out of the bag that Siebel BRY-97 is an isolate of BRY-96 with better flocculation characteristics), we can probably be assured that it is not Ballantine's ale culture, which is held by the NRRL as Y-7408.  That being said, I remember what a well-respected member of  BURP (the big DC brewing club) who brewed part-time at Old Dominion when it was in Virginia said about the culture back when I first started to brew.  She said that it was used by Narragansett to make Ballantine XXX after Falstaff shuttered the doors on the Ballantine brewery in Newark, NJ.  Even she assumed that the culture came from Ballantine.  However, now that genetic research has ruled out the Ballantine ale yeast culture being the parent of BRY-96, we have to look for a new source.  While someone has started brewing under the Narragansett label, Falstaff shuttered the original Narragansett brewery in 1981.  If what I was told in the early nineties is true, there is a high probability that somewhere in the Narragansett archives lies the source of BRY-96.  We have yet another yeast mystery on our hands.

With that said, there is a hole in the Narragansett link.  There appears to be no historical data that points to Narragansett producing ale before Falstaff moved production of Ballantine XXX to Narragansett.  Narragansett was founded by German immigrants as a lager brewery.  Narragansett was sold to Falstaff in 1965.  BRY-97 was deposited in 1967.  A possible source for the culture could have been the James Hanley Brewing Company in Providence (Eric where are you?), which was an ale brewery.  James Hanley was an Irish immigrant.  Narragansett could have acquired the strain after the Hanley brewery went out of business. Another explanation could be that the Narragansett lager culture was actually Saccharomyces cerevisiae instead of Saccharomyces pastorianus.
   

BRY-97 is actually an isolate from a brewery that used BRY-96.  At this point, we can assume that that brewery was Sierra Nevada.

Here is a message I received from Chris Large at UW:

I'll say starting out that we have in fact sequenced NRRL-Y 7407 and NRRL-Y 7408 as well as BRY96/97. As well, we are in contact with Tobias Fischborn at Lallemand who has provided interesting insights on BRY-96/97 history. It turns out that NRRL-Y 7407, by genome sequence, is a lager brewing strain - I haven't spent a lot of time looking at whether it is a Frohberg or Saaz lager strain, but it is almost certainly a lager yeast. We didn't include it in the publication because it felt too much like a distraction from the main story. The way I came to that conclusion was by taking the sequencing data from NRRL-Y 7407 and aligning it to either a lager reference genome or pure cerevisiae reference genome. I then looked at the percentage of reads that map to either the lager or cerevisiae reference. With the lager reference 98.68% of the reads mapped while with the pure cerevisiae reference 71.67% mapped, which is typical of lager strains. Please let me know if you have any more questions on these findings!

On the Wyeast1056 front - I've run several experiments that test a couple of your hypotheses. The first is that I tried to sporulate it to no avail (similar to Dunn et al). Second, I conducted an experiment wherein we fluorescently label the DNA inside of a yeast cell and see how much DNA there is when compared to diploid and tetraploid controls. The data from that showed pretty clearly that it was a tetraploid. We didn't end up including the data because when we found that there were four different versions of certain segments of DNA, we decided that was evidence enough that they are tetraploid (see the allele frequency plots in the publication if you are curious). As well, the findings from Gallone et al., 2016, which used similar techniques as us satisfied us that all of the American strains they sequenced are tetraploid (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31071-6). We would really love it if we could sporulate it though! As far as Dunn et al., 2008, I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion about Wyeast1056, but I imagine that it was likely an oversight.

Furthermore, we were a little thrown off up until recently by some sequencing of BRY-97 that placed it outside of the American brewing yeast strains (we now think that sequencing was of a contaminant). We have since received a copy of the original deposited strain from Tobias. I'm still in the process of finishing the analysis on it, but it appears that the strain is really closely related to Wyeast1056. As well, we got some info from Tobias about BRY-97: "BRY-97 was re-isolated from a brewery that originally bought Siebel’s BRY-96. The new isolate had some superior characteristics e.g. better flocculation. That is why we decided to use this isolate to commercialize as a dry yeast and call it BRY-97." I wouldn't be very surprised if Wyeast1056 is in fact a derivative of BRY-97, which is pretty neat (more analysis needed though).

Wyeast 1056 is in fact an isolate of Sierra Nevada's culture. BRY-97 has to be an isolate of Sierra Nevada's culture as well.

[erockrph]

With that said, there is a hole in the Narragansett link.  There appears to be no historical data that points to Narragansett producing ale before Falstaff moved production of Ballantine XXX to Narragansett.  Narragansett was founded by German immigrants as a lager brewery.  Narragansett was sold to Falstaff in 1965.  BRY-97 was deposited in 1967.  A possible source for the culture could have been the James Hanley Brewing Company in Providence (Eric where are you?), which was an ale brewery.  James Hanley was an Irish immigrant.  Narragansett could have acquired the strain after the Hanley brewery went out of business. Another explanation could be that the Narragansett lager culture was actually Saccharomyces cerevisiae instead of Saccharomyces pastorianus.
   

It's certainly possible that Gansett could have acquired Hanley's cultures. It appears that they purchased the rights to all the Hanley brands after the Hanley brewery closed in 1957. Of course, purchasing the rights to the brands doesn't necessarily mean that they were producing beer using the same ale strain. They didn't acquire the brewery itself,  however. The beer storage tanks were removed in 1960 and the building was demolished for the construction of Route 95.

Hanley was the man when it came to Rhode Island breweries in the pre-prohibition Era. Along with the Hanley brewery, he either founded or had his hands in the RI Brewing Company,  the Providence Brewing Company and the American Brewing Company. James Hanley was the only of these to survive prohibition as far as I'm aware. The American Brewing Company was built in 1892 with industrial climate control systems for producing lager beers. The building hasn't been used as a brewery since prohibition, but it's still around. I drive by it every day on my commute.

Not much here to help unlock the mystery of Chico, but it certainly has invigorated my interest of Rhode Island brewing history.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

[YeastIsInteresting]

Really interesting details in this thread.  I'm based in the UK and back in 2018 I requested NCYC to try and get a slope of Y-7408, which they did and it is now held at NCYC as 4308 https://www.ncyc.co.uk/catalogue/saccharomyces-cerevisiae-4308

I tried it out on a few beers and it was a true top cropper and crazy sulphurous mid to late fermentation.

To summarise and to remain on topic, is the consensus that Y-7407 (Ballentine Beer Pitching Strain) was banked at Siebel as BRY-96.  This was then subsequently picked up by Sierra Nevada and has since become known as Chico.  Lallemand released BRY-96 rather confusingly as BRY-97, and hence is the true dry form of SN's Chico strain?  Is this potentially a lager strain?  How does the Narragansett deposit information tie in with all this?

Anyway, I'm now tempted to try NCYC 4307!

[Bel Air Brewing]

This is definitely “inside baseball” for yeast nerds.

[tommymorris]

This is definitely “inside baseball” for yeast nerds.

But interesting just the same.

[YeastIsInteresting]

This is definitely “inside baseball” for yeast nerds.

I need help with this one.

[Wilbur]

This is definitely “inside baseball” for yeast nerds.

I need help with this one.

Baseball is a famously boring American game made tolerable through beer and hot dogs. "Inside baseball" is a term referring to a discussion so technical or esoteric no quantity of beer or hot dogs could make it tolerable for the layperson.

BR-97 is an improved version of BR-96, and might be the source for 1056 is what I'm reading. 7407 is a lager strain, and not related to BR-96?

I had thought US05 was the Chico strain, is that not the case?

[hopfenundmalz]

One of the SN personnel on a podcast said that the house strain is now more flocculant than the commercial Chico strains. If find it plausible that BRY-97 is the SN house strain.

I might try and bump up the SN yeast from bottles of Pale Ale. Anyone know that the use the same strain for bottling?