Most Australian beer is made from Australian-grown barley and hops, yet almost all uses yeast strains that originated in the Northern Hemisphere (Saccharomyces cerevisiae for ale and Saccharomyces pastorianus for lager). This is true even though yeasts in the Saccharomyces genus can be found in the wild in Australia.

We have assembled a collection of yeast strains harvested from different wilderness areas that show promise for making beer.  They ferment wort (“raw” beer) under anaerobic conditions, and they tolerate high levels of ethanol – but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily safe to make beer with.  To sort out the good from the bad we need to culture the yeasts, extract their DNA and undertake fungal barcoding.  There’s even a possibility that some of these yeasts are a previously undiscovered species.

This Honours project will provide participants with experience in Oxford Nanopore library preparation and amplicon sequencing, and the use of online tools such as Galaxy Australia and online databases such as NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information).  The project will be undertaken in the Schwessinger Lab in collaboration with an industry partner.

To express your interest in the project, please contact Benjamin Schwessinger.

[P.S. For those with an interest in brewing history, those bottles on the right are embossed with the logo of The Manufacturers Bottle Co of Victoria Pty Ltd – which means they’ve been sitting in that gully for at least half a century.  However, for more than a century it’s been standard practice in large-scale breweries to pasteurise bottled beer, so it’s highly unlikely that viable yeast could have escaped into the wild from the dregs left in the bottles.]