Detection and identification of Lactobacillus lindneri from brewery environments

Ten detection media and six cultivation techniques were evaluated for the detection of a harmful brewery contaminant, for which the name Lactobacillus lindneri was recently revived. These bacteria showed slow and weak growth on solid media.
However, enrichment of beer with NBB‐C or the use of a mixture of MRS and beer (4:1 v/v) reduced the detection time by 2 days or more, depending on the strain, compared to cultivation on solid brewery media. Eight brewery isolates from different origins, the type strain and a test strain were characterized by carbohydrate fermentation tests (API 50 CHL), by a chemotaxonomical (SDS‐PAGE) and by a genomic fingerprinting (ribotyping) method.
The results obtained by all these methods indicated that the isolates studied form a single group and can be assigned to the species L. lindneri. However, using the current standard reagents, ribotyping cannot discriminate the strains isolated from different sources.