The fungus of luck was discovered by Javier Carvajal, an Ecuadoran bioengineer, inside of an old wood barrel.
An Ecuadoran bioengineer named Javier Carvajal discovered a 400-year-old yeast specimen hidden inside an old oak barrel. He has now managed to revive the yeast and is using it to recreate what is said to be the oldest beer in all of Latin America.
He previously had success retrieving different yeasts and discovered the ancient Franciscan brewery in Quito whilst studying specialized beer journals. The brewery was located in Quito. He finally found an ancient brewery cask in 2008.
It was kept at the majestic San Francisco Convent in Quito, which was constructed between 1537 and 1680 and currently serves as a museum. The convent covers an area of three hectares. Following the extraction of a splinter, Carvajal utilized an optical microscope to locate a yeast specimen that he was able to revive after a lengthy incubation period.
Carvajal pulls a little vial containing a variant of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast out of its container in the laboratory that he works in at the Catholic University of Ecuador.
Ecuadoran: The Recipe
Carvajal, whose family has a long tradition in the brewery sector, discovered an article in a trade journal that provided a hazy description of the recipe for the Franciscans’ drink from the 16th century.
He resurrected the beverage by adding flavors of cinnamon, fig, clove, and sugarcane little by little as he pieced together tidbits of information.
Carvajal further added that
“There were a massive number of holes in the recipe and my job was to fill those holes. It is a work of beer archeology within the microbial archeology”
Resurrecting the yeast and the age-old procedures required to manufacture the historic recipe was nothing more than a labor of love for Carvajal, who was motivated solely by “the worth of the intangible.”
A Brief Overview of the Evolution of Beer and Yeasts
The researchers used genomic data to trace the common ancestor of the commercial beer and wild yeasts back to the 1500s before the definitive identification of microorganisms was made.
By harvesting the yeast sediment from the previous batch, early brewers could use it to inoculate their new batch, even if they didn’t know what was lurking in it. There’s no way to reconnect with nature when you’re reusing bacteria to produce beer. Brewery yeast was mutating and adapting as it grew.
