How time flies away…back on Aug. 8 I posted my report on a visit to Kelley Brothers Brewing in Manteca to taste a wheat beer made with 40-million-year-old yeast, which was revived by scientist Raul Cano, who has created Fossil Fuels Brewing with another scientist, Chip Lambert. The beer was great and I promised then to post the back story on how it was discovered. Well here, it comes, a little late, but not as late as the yeast, I guess.

First, just talked to Raul, who said they poured the wheat beer made with the yeast and a pale ale, also made with the yeast, at the Russian River Beer Revival & BBQ Cook-Off Sunday in Guerneville. “We had a great time and people really seemed to like the beer. Stumptown (Brewing) made the pale ale. We poured almost three kegs of the two beers in a short time,” he said. “We had lots of ‘repeat offenders’ (people who came back for more), and that was a good sign,:” he said.

Plans now are for Joe Kelley of Kelley Brothers to brew the beers for kegging early next month. They’re also talking to a brewer in the Central Coast to brew beer for bottling. Let’s hope they success, haven’t tasted the pale ale, but the wheat is one sweetie with a wild, interesting, enticing spicy finish.

Back story:

Raul, a Havana, Cuban-born American, who moved to Montana at age 16, (a real shock for a Cuban kid, he said.) got his Ph.D. from the University of Montana. Back in the late 1980s, he got the idea of trying to revive ancient organisms preserved in amber for millions of years.

There was a lot of skepticism, naturally, from the scientific community. However, one believer in the idea, proposed by Cano and many others, was author Michael Critchton whose 1990 novel, “Jurassic Park about recreating dinosaurs from preserved DNA became the basis for the Steven Spielberg films.

In the early 1990s, Cano and his colleagues at California Polytechnical University, San Luis Obsispo, revived bacteria DNA (bacillus sphaericus) extracted from the stomach of a bee preserved in amber from the Dominican Republic. Some scientists were skeptical, suggesting the sample had been contaminated by modern DNA in the lab. So Cano repeated the process under pristine, carefully-controlled conditions. The research was peer reviewed and published in Science in 1995.

Lambert later reproduced the research in his own lab, at XOMA Corp. in Berkeley, under identical conditions, he said.

But Cano, who holds the Unocal Chair for Environmental Studies at CalPoly and is director of the university’s Environmental Biotechnology Institute, didn’t stop with bees. He kept on resuscitating ancient DNA from amber samples gathered across the world. His quest wasn’t yeast or bacteria, but he was hoping to find something usefull to modern humans, perhaps something with novel antibiotic qualities.

He found yeast, lots of yeast, at least seven different strains from amber found in Miramar (Burma) in Southeast Asia. Once revived, Cano said he discovered they were actually Saccharomyces cerevisiae – brewer’s yeast – the same little creatures humans have been using to make ale. A homebrewer on Cano’s staff made the first batch of beer. He said he’s tasted better beer, but it was indeed beer.

By this time, their research had been published and was becoming famous. They actually served a beer made with the yeast at the wrap party for The Lost World: Jurassic Park, released in 1997 and the last of the series based on the Critchton novel.

Beer made with the yeast was finally made commercially last year by Peter Hackett at Stumptown in Guerneyville. This summer Joe Kelley made the wheat and Hackett made another batch of the pale ale. Kelley said the yeast was most unusual. It was slow to start fermenting, but when it did, it really worked. “It foamed up like laundry detergent,” Kelley said. When it was finished it flocculated in big chunks in a most unusual fashion, he said.

This is one wild story and the beer’s most unusual. Can’t wait for the next chapter in this very ancient story.