I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Let's talk for a minute about yeast and beer. I think that we've all

witnessed the growing craft beer scene over the last decade and I know a lot of us are incorporating these beers

into our beverage programs and if you're like me you're drinking them all the time.

But when you get into the details talking about lagers and ails is a lot more complex than it seems on the surface.

So the easy definition that everybody regurgitates is that ails are made with top fermenting yeasts and lagers are made with bottom fermenting yeast.

But distinguishing between these two is a lot more complex than that.

So before Belgian lagers came on the scene in the 1400s,

essentially all beers were ails, and the split in genre occurred before the yeasts, and brewers didn't know that yeast was microscopically behind the phenomenon of bottom

fermenting lagers in top fermenting ails.

All that they really knew was that suddenly they could ferment at lower temperatures for longer periods of time.

And today we know this is because a different species of yeast traveled to Europe and began to

be used in beer production.

And this yeast most likely originated in Patagonia of all places where it had a symbiotic relationship with sugary tree galls.

Now this is actually pretty interesting. So imagine you're in Patagonia and all of these beech trees are all around you and these

trees actually produce these bulbous things that grow on them and they're actually

full of sugar and these local yeasts their official Latin name is Pastorianists, so these local Pastorianists

attach themselves to the Gauls, eat them, they actually ferment and can be eaten as food.

And if you think about it, Loggers came to be in the 1400s, right around the time when

ship exploration to the Americas was gearing up into full swing.

So it makes sense that these ships that are going back and forth across the Atlantic

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