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Commonly known as lager yeast to brewers, this yeast is a hybrid of ''S. eubayanus'' and ''S. cerevisiae'' <ref name="wikipedia_cereisiae" />. ''S. pastorianus'' is named after the first description by Max Reess in 1870 following his work with German breweries utilizing bottom-fermenting lager yeast, naming it originally after Louis Pasteur.
For a long time the origins of the hybrid were unknown and were postulated to be a hybrid between ''S. cerevisiae'' and ''S.uvarum'', or ''S. cerevisiae'' and ''S.bayanus''. Recent work eg. Libkind et al 2011 proved that the hybridisation was between ''S. eubayanus'', which had been recently found in South America and ''S. cerevisiae'' <ref name="libkind_2011" />. Further work points to a Tibetan lineage of ''S.eubayanus'' being the most likely from those discovered in the wild so far <ref name="bing_2014" /> (see also [https://www.facebook.com/groups/MilkTheFunk/posts/6399366356758191/?comment_id=6399963343365159 this MTF post]). It is hypothesized that the hybridization event occurred in a Bavarian brewery in the 16th century by the chance interaction of ''S. eubayanus'' with ale yeast; however, an alternative hypothesis is that bottom-fermentation with ''S. eubayanus'' was in practice before lager yeast was created <ref>[https://academic.oup.com/femsyr/article/doi/10.1093/femsyr/foad023/7142826 Mathias Hutzler, John P Morrissey, Andreas Laus, Franz Meussdoerffer, Martin Zarnkow, A new hypothesis for the origin of the lager yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus, FEMS Yeast Research, Volume 23, 2023, foad023, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsyr/foad023.]</ref>.
This species is separated into two main lineages, "Saaz" and "Frohberg". The two lineages are believed to have descended from different hybridization events between ''S. eubayanus'' and ''S. cerevisiae''. The two lineages also have different genetic structure, with Frohberg types having two copies of each of the ''S. eubayanus'' and ''S. cerevisiae'' chromosomes (triploid), and Saaz types having one copy of the ''S. cerevisiae'' chromosomes and two copies of the ''S. eubayanus'' chromosomes (allotetraploid) <ref><[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24578374 Genome sequence of Saccharomyces carlsbergensis, the world's first pure culture lager yeast. Walther A, Hesselbart A, Wendland J. 2014. DOI: 10.1534/g3.113.010090.]</ref>