The Past, Present, and Future of Lager Yeast (Good Beer Hunting) No matter how much scientists and historians have searched—and they've literally hunted in forests, cellars, and old brewery buildings, and have run all the DNA testing that's available to them—a void has existed at the heart of what is the world's most popular and most consumed beer. But just within the last year, the latest detective work and scholarly research have led to a compelling new theory about lager's true origins. After many centuries—spanning lager's 14th-century beginnings to its present-day ubiquity—have we finally solved the foundational mystery behind the world's best-loved beer?

An amateur brewer in Utah gathered rare figs and a strain of yeast from 850 B.C. to make a sour, fruity concoction inspired by ancient Egyptian recipes.

© Kim Raff for The New York Times

The New York Times magazine remembers that once upon a time, in the early 1990s, "some prominent researchers were promoting, and the media helped popularize, the idea that moderate drinking...was linked to greater longevity. "The cause of that association was not clear, but red wine, researchers theorized, might have anti-inflammatory properties that extended life and protected cardiovascular health..." More recently, though, research has piled up debunking the idea that moderate drinking is good for you. Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health; and in 2022, a well-designed study found that consuming even a small amount brought some risk to heart health. That same year, Nature published research stating that consuming as little as one or two drinks a day (even less for women) was associated with shrinkage in the brain — a phenomenon normally associated with aging... [M]ore people are now reporting that they consume cannabis than alcohol on a daily basis. Some governments are responding to the new research by overhauling their messaging. Last year, Ireland became the first country to pass legislation requiring a cancer warning on all alcohol products sold there, similar to those found on cigarettes: "There is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers," the language will read. And in Canada, the government has revised its alcohol guidelines, announcing: "We now know that even a small amount of alcohol can be damaging to health." The guidelines characterize one to two drinks a week as carrying "low risk" and three to six drinks as carrying "moderate risk." (Previously the guidelines suggested that women limit themselves to no more than two standard drinks most days, and that men place that limit at three.)

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