The diversity of commercially available ale and lager yeast strains and the impact of brewer’s preferential yeast choice on the fermentative beer profiles

Abstract Yeasts from the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ale yeast) and Saccharomyces pastorianus (lager yeast) are the main component of beer fermentation. It is known that different beer categories depend on the use of specific ale or lager strains, where the yeast imprints its distinctive fermentative profile to the beer. Despite this, there are no studies reporting how diverse, rich, and homogeneous the beer categories are in terms of commercially available brewing yeast strains. In this work, the diversity, richness, and evenness of different beer categories and commercial yeast strains available for brewing were evaluated by applying quantitative concepts of diversity analysis in a sample of 119,189 beer recipes. For this purpose, the frequency of ale or lager and dry or liquid yeast formulations usage was accessed and its correlation with the number of yeast strains, recipes, lowest and highest values of original and final gravity, international bitter units, and alcohol by volume were analyzed. A statistical framework was applied for comparing the lowest and highest fermentation temperature as well as the attenuation percentage for ale and lager yeasts strains in both dry and liquid formulations. Additionally, the brewer’s preferential use of a specific brewing yeast strain in comparison to all different yeast strains reported for a beer category was estimated. The results indicated that many beer categories are preferentially fermented with dry yeast formulations instead of liquid yeasts, despite the high number of available liquid yeast formulations. Finally, the preferential use of specific yeast formulations drives the fermentative diversity of a beer category, showing that many yeast strains are potentially and industrially underexplored.