Well, here’s something interesting from the Style section of the Washington Post.

The Beer That Takes You Back . . . Millions of Years

Raul Cano is the real-life “Jurassic Park” scientist. Yes, there is one.

A day before that movie opened in 1993, Cano announced that he had extracted DNA from an ancient Lebanese weevil entombed in amber, just as the fictional employees of InGen do with a mosquito to create their dino-amusement park. One newspaper account said the “achievement” refuted “the long-held view of many biologists that DNA of so great an age” couldn’t be preserved.

[...]

“I was going through my collection, going, ‘Gee whiz — this is pretty nifty. Maybe we could use it to make beer,’ ” says Cano, 63 , now the director of the Environmental Biotechnology Institute at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

The result is Fossil Fuels Brewing Co., which ferments a yeast strain Cano found in a piece of Burmese amber dating from about 25 million to 45 million years ago. The company — in which Cano is a partner, along with another scientist and a lawyer — introduced its pale ale and German wheat beer with a party last month at one of the two Bay Area pubs where Fossil Fuels is made and served.

In April, at the World Beer Cup in San Diego, “we had one judge give us the highest marks, one just below and one who didn’t like it,” says Chip Lambert, 63, the company’s other second microbiologist. “We learned that the issue was that in these competitions, you brew to match the traditional concept of the style, which these yeast just don’t do.”

William Brand, the Oakland Tribune beer critic, says the ancient yeast provides the wheat beer with a distinctively “clove-y” taste and a “weird spiciness at the finish.” (The Washington Post Style section’s summer beer critic pronounced it “smooth and spicy, excellent with chicken strips.”)

Now, not only do we have companies making beer derived from recipes that are thousands of years old, but now we also have yeast that is tens of millions of years old being used to make beer.

Everything old is new again.

(via bookofjoe)

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