BEER MADE WITH 45 MILLION YEAR OLD YEAST

Shades of JURASSIC PARK!!!  At the face this is just fascinating, and shows just how tenacious life is.  But I cannot help but wonder if a bacteria that could be extremely harmful could also be activated.   As that great Greek philosopher Anonymous, said thousands of years ago.  "Just because you are paranoid, does not mean they are not out to get you."

PREHISTORIC YEAST REBORN IN MODERN BEER

ERIC BLAND; Discovery News

Sept. 23, 2008, Discovery News Channel -- Trapped inside a Lebanese weevil covered in ancient Burmese  amber, a tiny colony of bacteria and yeast has lain dormant for up to 45 million years. A decade ago Raul Cano, now a scientist at the California Polytechnic State University, drilled a tiny hole into the amber and extracted more than 2,000 different kinds of microscopic creatures.

Activating the ancient yeast, Cano now brews barrels (not bottles) of pale ale and German wheat beer through the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company.

"You can always buy brewing yeast, and your product will be based on the brewmaster's recipes," said Cano. "Our yeast has a double angle: We have yeast no one else has and our own beer recipes."

The beer has received good reviews at the Russian River Beer Festival and from other reviewers. The Oakland Tribune beer critic, William Brand, says the beer has "a wierd spiciness at the finish," and The Washington Post said the beer was "smooth and spicy."

Part of that taste comes from the yeast's unique metabolism. "The ancient yeast is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates, unlike more modern yeasts, which can consume just about any kind of sugar," said Cano.

Eventually the yeast will likely evolve the ability to eat other sugars, which could change the taste of the beer. Cano plans to keep a batch of the original yeast to keep the beer true to form.

If this has a ring of deju-vu, it could be because Cano's amber-drilling technique is the same one popularized in the movie Jurassic Park, where scientists extracted ancient dinosaur DNA from the bellies of blood-sucking insects trapped in fossilized tree sap.

Cano's original goal was to find ancient microscopic creatures that might have some kind of medical value, particularly pharmaceutical drugs.

While that particular avenue of research didn't yield significant results, the larger question of how microscopic creatures survived for millions of years could help scientists understand certain diseases, said Charles Greenblatt, a scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who studies ancient bacteria.

"We've got cases of guys who contracted [tuberculosis] during World War II and lived with it for 60, 70 years," said Greenblatt. "Then suddenly they get another disease, the TB wakes up from its dormancy and kills them."

Inducing dormancy could be a new way to fight disease and infection, said Greenblatt. Instead of outright killing infectious creatures, doctors could instead put them to sleep. The infection would still be present in the patient's body, but it wouldn't hurt the patient.

Neither Cano nor Greenblatt can say what the upper limit for hibernating yeast or bacteria is; it could be hundreds of million years. But while other scientists work on that, Cano plans to spend his time tossing back a few cold ones, and hoping others will too.

"We think that people will drink one beer out of curiosity," said Cano. "But if the beer does taste good no one will drink a second."

  

HISTORY OF BEER PART 1 SUMERIAN BEER

Ninkasi, Sumerian goddess of Beer and Fertility

*****

Whatever Happened to Sumerian Beer?

Horst Dornbusch on Beer and Civilization #11

Feature Article by HorstDornbusch / 07-13-2007

Anthropologists and archaeologists believe that the first humans ever to make the great leap from a nomadic and tribal into a civilized and sedentary existence were the Sumerians, some eight to ten thousand years ago. The place was Mesopotamia (now the southern portion of present-day Iraq). Apparently the Sumarians had migrated there all the way from India. Once settled in the Middle East, they build elaborate communities, grouped in prosperous city-states, and surrounded by fertile fields, which they kept lush by communal irrigation from the waters of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. The most magnificent of their urban centers was Babylon on the banks of the lower Euphrates. The Sumerians are considered the world's first builders, farmers, and writers - and, as we know from archaeological finds, probably the first brewers, too. Beer was at the center of their religious rituals. Their highest deity was the goddess of beer and fertility. It is a measure of the importance of beer in Sumerian society that eventually about half their grain ended up in their brews.

The Official Story of the Sumerian Exit from History
The Sumerians' ingenuity and wealth soon became a magnet for other, non-brewing, people around them. Newcomers, mostly Semitic tribes from the north and west, began to move into Mesopotamia - sometimes commingling peacefully with the Sumerians, sometimes fighting wars against them for supremacy. As a result, the Sumerians eventually began to be absorbed by their numerous neighbors and gradually disappeared as a distinct culture. By the start of the third millennium BC, Sumeria had faded almost completely into oblivion. In its place arose a new culture, which historians call Babylonian.

The new masters of Mesopotamia centralized power away from the many scattered city-states ruled by kings, queens, and priestesses, to just one center, Babylon, and they unified the loose cluster of Sumerian settlements into a territorial state and government. This new, broad regional organization, Babylonia, was, in essence, the first sovereign country in history.

Once the Babylonians consolidated their power internally, they turned their attention to external conquest. They poured their resources into building a mighty army, which they marched westward to the shores of the Mediterranean, northward into Armenia, eastward into Persia, and southward into Arabia and the islands of the Persian Gulf. In the process, they amassed the first true empire in history - with the king of Babylon known as the King of the Totality, or the King of the Four Regions. He ruled an empire that spanned the four corners of the then-known world.

This is the official story of the demise of the Sumerians and the Babylonian take-over of their lands, at least as it is written in the history books. However, the common narrative of history always seems to focus on political and military events, while the less transient forces of social evolution often receive only scant attention. What we do not learn from the shifting sands of military power in Mesopotamia is what happened to the all-important Sumerian beer as Sumerian society changed under the burden of conquest! Born out of the mist of prehistory as the twin of society itself, did beer survive in the new order? That's a question historians rarely address.