The father of quality lager
When you drink a Carlsberg beer, it will taste the same every time. We can thank a groundbreaking discovery in 1883, which took place at the Carlsberg Research Laboratory, for that.
We have a lot to thank former head of the Carlsberg Research Laboratory Emil Christian Hansen for. He is the reason why the quality of beer increased significantly after he discovered how to purify yeast cells. Suddenly you could brew consistent and good beer every time. Until then, brewers fought with beer turning bad - usually because of the wrong yeast strains taking over.
Purified yeast = good beer
To start from the beginning, the function of brewer's yeast in beer is to break down sugar into alcohol. During fermentation, substances are also secreted that help give the beer its aroma. But what does it mean to be able to cultivate pure yeast?
It gets a bit technical, but what Emil Christian Hansen did was to isolate the good yeast strands from the multi-stranded yeast culture to purify them. The result was that he was left with a completely purified yeast culture. Of course, hygiene and temperature still had to be controlled during brewing, but if it was under control, the yeast behaved exactly as expected. The result was good beer with every brew. Later, Emil Christian Hansen designed the world’s first apparatus for cultivating pure yeast strains.
A much-appreciated discovery
Instead of simply keeping the intrusive discovery within Carlsberg's four walls, Carlsberg's founder J.C. Jacobsen shared the discovery with the outside world. The brewer sent the purified brewer's yeast, which was given the name Saccharomyces cerevisiae, around to his brewing colleagues all over the world.
Truly a triumph for scientific research!
J. C. Jacobsen
If you dig into J.C. Jacobsen's Digital Correspondence Archive, belonging to the Carlsberg Foundation, you will find a letter from J.C. to his brewing teacher Gabriel Sedelmayr, at that time Brewmaster at Spaten Brewery in Munich, about the discovery of purified yeast:
"Using a very ingenious method, Mr. Hansen succeeded in distributing the cells in such a way that in a large number of pasteur flasks there was only a single cell in each. (…) The yeast from the pure Saceharomyces cerevisia was then introduced into the brewery as yeast and produced a very nice fermentation (…) Truly a triumph for scientific research! (…) So far, I have no experience of sending yeast on long trips, but I will probably get that experience soon.”
A revolution in beer brewing
Carlsberg's discovery is a milestone in beer history that has created better beer throughout the world. And the purified yeast has not only been of great importance for beer. With everything from dairies and wine producers to pharmaceutical companies and bakeries, pure organisms are in high demand and help daily to standardise the quality of products.