Hansen: a yeast culture grown from a single cell at the Carlsberg Laboratory

1883 Life and health method

The industrial cultivation of brewer's yeast from a single cell: the foreign 'wild' microflora that spoiled the taste of the beer is replaced by a homogeneous culture in which all cells descend from a single ancestor.

The occasion was a crisis in the brewery: a bitter taste and a bad odour began to appear in Carlsberg beer, and foreign yeasts were causing the breweries direct financial losses. The Dane Emil Hansen, who had worked in the brewery laboratory since 1878, took up the pure-cultivation methods of Pasteur, Koch and Salomonsen and carried them as far as growing a culture from a single cell. On 12 November 1883 the first beer was brewed from such a culture.

Jacob Jacobsen refused to patent the method, and within a few years clones of bottom-fermenting yeast became the standard of world brewing.

Why this date

High. On 12 November 1883 the first beer brewed from a pure culture was made (E. Snorrason's article in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography); Barnett and Lichtenthaler likewise date the method to 1883. The bibliographic details of Hansen's early paper in the Meddelelser fra Carlsberg Laboratoriet are taken from the reference list of Barnett and Lichtenthaler.

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