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Brewing Beer Biodiversity

The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is Vancouver’s natural history museum. We work to promote a greater understanding of, and collective responsibility for, the biodiversity of BC, Canada, and the World.
Beaty Biodiversity Museum

Beaty Biodiversity Museum The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is Vancouver’s natural history museum. We work to promote a greater understanding of, and collective responsibility for, the biodiversity of BC, Canada, and the World. Come visit us on UBC campus - we’re located at 2212 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC. You can find more info at . Follow us @beatymuseum on Ìý&²¹³¾±è;Ìý and like us on .

Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­is home to some pretty awesome beer makers and naturally VIA has plenty of great posts about this delicious beverage like , , and Bob Kronbauer’s . Lots of angles of beer have been covered like the history, flavour and branding. But have you ever wondered about the science of beer making?

As your natural history museum we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about beer. It is made from natural ingredients featured in our collection:

  1. Hops aka Humulus lupulus

Hops from the Beaty Biodiversity Collection.Hops from the Beaty Biodiversity Collection.

  1. Barley aka Hordeum vulgare

Barley from the Beaty Biodiversity Museum Collection.Barley from the Beaty Biodiversity Museum Collection.

Both hops and barley are kept in the UBC Herbarium - they are pressed, dried and mounted on a flat sheet of paper. We have 17 different hops plants ranging from local ones right here at UBC to hops collected internationally in Denmark and England. There are seven barley samples in our collection mostly from Canada.

  1. Yeast aka Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Yeast by Flickr user Rising Damp http://tinyurl.com/ova7hxdYeast by Flickr user Rising Damp http://tinyurl.com/ova7hxd

We don’t keep this important ingredient in our collection - the dried version doesn’t look like much. Instead this is housed in UBC’s living culture collection either in its live version or in stasis in cold storage (in liquid nitrogen).

Beer Taster by Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski http://tinyurl.com/pbq4kyfBeer Taster by Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

Want to know more?  on Thursday January 15th from 7pm-9:30pm (doors open at 6:30pm) and get a Curatorial tour of the plants and yeasts that make beer then taste some samples from our friends at and . This is a members only event but the cost of  – the cost of the average beer tasting event plus you get access to the museum for the rest of the year (and other exclusive members events).