And since yeast are notoriously prone to mutations, new strains would crop up all the time, and preserving the old ones would become a kind of sacred trust. That’s why sourdough starters used to be part of young women’s dowries, handed down from mother to daughter, and it’s why today’s boozemakers tend to return to a preserved, frozen sample of their yeast and grow more instead of just letting the same batch bubble away. It’s why, before Daniel Bacardi fled Cuba in advance of the encroaching revolutionary army in 1960, he destroyed every sample of the fast-fermenting yeast strain that made his
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