Class Trip To Brewery

When I think back on it, it seems a little incredulous, but we took a high school science trip to the Molson Breweries in west Toronto. We weren't even old enough to drink. I snapped the above pics on that class trip. My interests were not entirely scientific.

However stupid that the trip sounds (taking high school students to a brewery), it served me well later in university. How you ask?

I was taking a course in microbiology in University, and my professor, Dr. Don Kushner was lecturing about yeasts. He casually mentioned that most beers brewed in Canada used one strain or another of Saccharomyces carlsbergensis --THE beer yeast of Canada. He said that the yeast was impossible to get because it was a closely guarded trade secret.

For our end-of-term project, we had to collect air samples and isolate a strain of a yeast by culturing air-borne spores. My lab partner Bruce Baker and I decided to get Dr. Kushner his sample.

We sent a letter to the brewmaster of Molsons, politely asking him for a sample of the yeast. He wrote back saying that he couldn't give a sample. However, when the letter came back, we rushed it to the lab. We didn't open it right away. We opened it under controlled conditions, and cultured the whole letter, hoping that some spores of Saccharomyces carlsbergensis were in the envelope. After all they are tiny spores and they should have been in his office at the brewery. After many many cultures, we finally isolated the yeast. Our class paper was the petri dish of Saccharomyces carlsbergensis along with the test results that we did to prove it was in fact the yeast. We got an A+.