UQ licences wild yeast from Jacaranda tree to Newstead Brewing Co to make beer

University of Queensland scientists have teamed up with a popular local craft brewer to produce a beer with a very unusual Brisbane ingredient.

A CRAFT beer brewed with wild yeast derived from the leaves of a Brisbane Jacaranda tree is under development with commercialisation expected in less than five years.

The yeast from a tree on the grounds of the University of Queensland St Lucia campus, near the Brisbane River, has been licensed to Newstead Brewing Co.

UQ PhD candidate Edward Kerr and yeast biologist Ben Schulz have worked on the beer for three years after spending months gathering hundreds of wild yeasts from plants on the campus, in Brisbane’s west.

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University of Queensland scientists Dr Ben Schulz and Edward Kerr with beakers of beer. At Newstead Brewing Co's Pic Annette Dew

Another beer is in the works based on wild yeast found on a campus Poinciana tree.

“We found hundreds of yeasts from around UQ at St Lucia but only a really small number of those actually turned out to be any good at making beer,” Dr Schulz said.

After colonising the wild yeast on plates and then testing strains for fermentation, they performed sniff and taste tests. Some of them tasted no better than nail polish remover.

But an experimental brew made from the Jacaranda tree-derived yeast has been described as having a mixture of wild peach, lychee and fresh-baked sourdough flavours.

“At the moment we’re making small-scale batches of this beer and we’re working with Newstead Brewing to be able to make larger-scale batches, which would be able to be sold in commercial settings,” Dr Schulz said. “We think it’s pretty tasty.”

Mr Kerr said beers made from wild-fermented yeasts took much longer to brew – up to three months compared to eight days with brewer’s yeast.

Newstead Brewing Co’s CEO Mark Howes said the business hoped to make the UQ beer available “when we are confident in the consistency and flavour attributes of the yeast”.

He said the plan was to first sell the wild-yeast beer at Newstead Brewing’s two venues in the Brisbane suburbs of Newstead and Milton.

University of Queensland scientists Dr Ben Schulz and Edward Kerr, who are making beer using wild yeast from a Jacaranda tree on UQ’s St Lucia campus. Co's Pic Annette Dew

“After that, I would hope that all good, independent bars and bottle shops in Brisbane would be happy to sell a beer made with Brisbane yeast,” Mr Howes said.

“It’s a pretty niche product. Therefore, we don’t have any preconceptions as to the volume of sales for a beer made with yeast native to Brisbane.

“If people like it, we will make more of it. If they don’t, we’ll try something else. That’s the beauty of independent beer. We aren’t subject to volume of sales projections to make a project viable or not.”

Dr Schulz, who has a background in using yeast to understand cell biology before moving into the science of beer making, says “the sky’s the limit” in terms of the possibilities that wild yeasts bring to brewing.

“We’ve got these two yeasts that make really tasty beer with a standard recipe,” he said. “But we’re certainly not stopping with that. It’s possible that different recipes could let the flavours that come from these two yeasts really shine. And, of course, there are many other different wild yeasts that we’ve got in our collection that we haven’t explored yet.

“It would be fantastic to get yeasts from different suburbs in Brisbane and have a suburb-versus-suburb beer off to see which suburb has the yeast which makes the tastiest beer.”

UQ’s commercialisation company UniQuest was involved in the licensing of the two wild yeast varieties to Newstead Brewing Co.