Celebrityscraps

Everyone who prides them selves of knowing a bit about film will have seen Jurassic Park. It was one of the first films to use realistic CG to create creatures and we all know the tale of how the dinosaurs were cloned.

Mosquitoes feed on Dino blood - fly gets stuck in amber - amber fossilises - 45 million years later human takes Dino blood from amber encased fly and clones Dino.

Well now in the real world the same technique has been used to make beer using a strain of yeast from 45 million years ago!

The company is called the Fossil Brewing Co. and their site says the process went a bit like this:

“Dr. Raul Cano, using amber obtained from locations around the world (including Burma, Central and North America), isolated and revived a bacterium, which had lain dormant in the gut of an encased bee for approximately 40 million years (Science 268, pp. 1060-1064, 1995). During his research, Dr. Cano, periodically working with Mr. Lambert, isolated a few yeast strains that resembled modern Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In other words, they are similar to the yeast we use every day for brewing and baking, except the newly discovered yeasts were much further back in the evolutionary chain. Essentially, Dr. Cano isolated the long lost ancestors of modern brewing yeast.”

They are not shipping the beer outside of their suppliers yet, but I’ve been added to their mailing list so as soon as it’s possible I’ll be treating myself to a glass of Fred Flinstone’s favourite lager…. or close enough!