For Jennings, however, the NCYC—a living database, literally—was a very particular kind of insurance policy. Its lab had deposited a sample of the Jennings brewing yeast, the key component in its signature ale recipe, with the Center. Which meant that, even after the flood, it could keep brewing. (It borrowed other brewers' equipment while it rebuilt its own facilities.)

The Center preserves its samples of yeast in a form called "slope," suspended in agar in glass vials and then frozen. It also makes backups of the brewers' backups, in the form of freeze-dried yeast powder, sealed inside glass ampules and stored inside cabinets—they resemble filing cabinets, Rogers notes—in a large, refrigerated room. "Their tops have the pulled-taffy look of glass that's been melted over a Bunsen burner," he writes. "Inside each is a bit of cotton and a puff of white dust. That's the yeast."

The yeast is, in its way, living history. Brewers can house their strains securely as well as deposit them in an open collection; this gives other brewers the possibility of using that yeast for their own creations. (If you want buy some, you can do so here.) Today's microbrewers are eager to make new concoctions with yeast from the 1940s, Chris Bond, the collection manager, tells Rogers. (And once, "we actually had someone trying to recreate a South American beer from the Incas," he notes.) You can think of the Center as a strain, if you'll pardon the pun, of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway—an archive meant to preserve our bio-heritage. The Center treats microbes not just as ingredients in some of humanity's oldest recipes (beer! booze!), but also as part of a heritage worth preserving in its own right. It recognizes our cultural reliance on microbes.

"If you are a brewer and you plan to make a product people like, and keep making it the same way," Rogers writes, "you must maintain your yeast." Which is also to say: "If you lose your yeast, you're dead."

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