Jurassic Saison: The World’s Most Ancient Ale That Took 45 Million Years to Make

Brewers are a strange and wonderful species. Half mad scientist, half avant-garde artist, they’ve been known to push the boundaries of what beer can be. Need proof? In 2016, a U.K. brewery crafted a Polish Grätzer-style beer called Mr. Twit’s Odious Ale using yeast swabbed from none other than Roald Dahl’s writing chair (yes, the man behind “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” unknowingly lent his desk microbes to the brewing world). And just when you thought that was as weird as it gets—enter Jurassic Saison.

This wasn’t just a gimmick. This was a French-style farmhouse ale brewed with yeast that had been snoozing for 45 million years. Created by a team of molecular biologists under the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company label, Jurassic Saison made every other “experimental” beer look like child’s play. Forget barrel-aging—this was amber-aging.

From Amber to Ale

Here’s the wild origin story: back in the 1990s, molecular biologist Raul Cano was doing research when he successfully extracted DNA from a weevil trapped in amber. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s basically the same premise as Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”—only instead of dinosaurs, we got beer. (Frankly, a safer choice for humankind.)

Cano didn’t stop at DNA. He later isolated a 45-million-year-old yeast spore from amber mined in Burma (Myanmar). Through a process that involved freezing the amber in liquid nitrogen, shattering it, and cultivating fragments in microbiological growth media, one little yeast cell woke up and got to work. As Cano explained to the Washington Post in 2008: “It’s just like the Rip Van Winkle effect. What they are doing, they are remaining dormant — the bacteria or the yeast and generally spores of some sort — and then when you take them out of the amber, they reawaken and continue to reproduce.”

Naturally, the next logical step was to brew beer with it. Cano partnered with fellow scientist Chip Lambert, teamed up with a homebrewer, and by 1997, their ancient-ale experiment was ready to pour. In one of those perfectly poetic cultural mash-ups, the beer was even served at the cast party for “The Lost World,” the sequel to Jurassic Park.

Fast-Forward to Jurassic Saison

By 2006, Fossil Fuels Brewing Company had a presence on tap in Guerneville, California. The real showstopper came in 2016 when, with the help of Ian Schuster of Schubros Brewery, they debuted Jurassic Saison, a French farmhouse wheat ale. Like many farmhouse beers, it had earthy and citrusy notes—but this one stood out. As Schuster told Vice at the time: “In this Saison, it has a really unique grapefruit taste and aroma.”

So what did it taste like? Imagine lemon zest, peppery spice, and an unexpected grapefruit kick—all riding on a beer whose yeast predated the invention of beer itself (ancient Sumerians circa 4000 B.C. were late to the party by several million years).

The End of an Era (For Now)

Sadly, like the dinosaurs, Jurassic Saison is no longer roaming the earth. Fossil Fuels Brewing seems to have fizzled out, and the beer is no longer in production. But for those curious enough, bottles still pop up online, relics of the most literal kind of “ancient ale” you could ever drink.

And who knows? Maybe one day the company—or someone equally bold—will bring it back. If a yeast can come back from a 45-million-year nap, surely a beer can stage a comeback too.

Until then, Jurassic Saison lives on in beer lore, proving that sometimes the weirdest ideas make for the most unforgettable pours.