While the startup’s co-founders viewed hoppy-tasting but hop-free beer as potentially beneficial to brewers and the environment, as Denby said in a New York Times story after the newspaper was published – some hop farmers felt threatened. They feared that artificial yeast could end an agricultural tradition and erode the soul of brewing, a dance of microorganisms, farmers, brewers and hops dating back to the 11th century.
Denby refuses to officially talk about the animosity, which caught the company by surprise, but news of the provocative idea swept the industry. “In the beginning we got calls from hop farmers saying, ‘Crap, you’re not going to use hops anymore?'” says Bryan Donaldson, brewing innovation manager at Lagunitas and co-author of the 2018 paper. (Some hop farmers are still tense: “One guy stood at a hop conference this year and said, ‘We don’t like these yeasts, because these yeasts can make hop flavors. This is the Beyond Meat of beer,'” Jeremy Marshall, Lagunita’s head brewmaster, recalls.)
Berkeley Yeast turned around quickly. Denby and his co-founders interviewed over 100 brewers to ask what the yeast strain of their dreams would do and found that there wasn’t really much interest in eliminating hops altogether, although some brewers wanted to reduce hop use a bit for cost reasons.
The feedback led Berkeley to focus on strains that improve efficiency, such as by removing diacetyl, or enhancing natural hop flavors by adding specific compounds or enzymes. An example is the enzyme carbon-sulfur lyase, which takes up tasteless molecules in malt and hops and releases flavorful components called thiols that make beer taste like tropical fruits. Berkeley created its Tropics strain by modifying a yeast commonly used for hazy IPAs to produce the enzyme.
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Since Berkeley Yeast developed its pitch, many hop farmers have adapted as well, recognizing that new yeasts can make it easier for brewers to emphasize nuanced hop flavors that would otherwise have been too difficult to isolate with a standard yeast. “I think we could see an even bigger push toward hops working with these new strains of yeast,” said Brian Tennis, the founder of the Hop Alliance. “As hop growers, we have to make sure we grow what the market demands.”
Although it is a fixture in craft brewing, to become truly big, Berkeley Yeast will have to win over the largest multinational beer groups such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and Heineken. Craft brewing makes up only a quarter of the US beer market.
Major beer companies have been testing the startup’s yeasts, says co-founder Denby, though he declines to name them. Marshall of Lagunitas — a craft beer powerhouse now owned by brewing giant Heineken — thinks it’s only a matter of time. “Someone is going to jump in, and we’re on the verge of that,” he says. “I don’t know who it will be, but once they do, I think it’s going to be commonplace.”
Lagunitas offers beers made with Berkeley strains in its taproom, including the Martial Martian Express with “Uncanny Pineapple” flavors, but you won’t find those in supermarkets. Marshall says major beer distributors are still not sure if consumers will be receptive to the concept of GMO yeast and would like to know if the GMO skepticism of the 1990s and early 2000s is gone.
Denby says he’s confident that eventually, like craft brewers, the biggest beer makers won’t be able to resist the creative potential and efficiency of artificial yeast. “It will take more time to scale up, but the wider beer industry is going to change,” he says. Despite his original vision for the company, he also believes that hops are here to stay. He says Berkeley’s goal is to complement tradition, not threaten it.
