I live close to the Gâtinais (been thinking about calling my brewery Bracino Wastinensis, the old Frank derivation of the Latin pagus appellation for the region) and have thought long and hard about what I’d like to do that could be “hyper local” in terms of beer. So what I’d love to do is harvest wild yeast - but not anything else. I don’t want funky beers, I just want something done with a local yeast. So, how would I do it?
Most wild yeasts will give you funky flavors - lots of phenols. They also tend to be poor fermentors, poorly flocculant and otherwise not good for brewing.
If you’re wanting to literally trust to the winds, you can just leave your cooled wort uncovered outdoors overnight. That’s (sort of) how lambics are innoculated. If you’re wanting to isolate the local strains, then you need to learn about yeast cultivation, which will require special equipment.
Looking at where you live, you’re not that far from some of the classic commercial producers of Biere de Garde and Saison. They’re the sources for your classic local brewing yeasts. See if you can beg some yeast slurry from a local brewery or brewpub. Alternately, find an interesting local bottle-conditioned beer and cultivate your yeast from that.
Get some local fruit and make a “natural” wine (add sugar if needed) to get to about 14%. Grow your culture from that. The high alcohol content of the wine will kill all the baddies and you will have a local culture left over for your beer.
Dear Naysayers,
I have already done it , and it works, so just let it go.
Out of curiosity tubercle, how can you be sure what you have isolated is not brett? I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this and make sure he doesn’t get any brett, but haven’t come up with an easy way to distinguish it from sacch. I know 14% is on the high end for most lab brett strains, but it doesn’t seem like it would be out of the realm of possibility for a truly wild strain.
Either way, this seems like a better method than the stuff I’ve been thinking about.
So do you toss the first batch, or does the nasty stuff die off fast enough that it is still drinkable? I’ve been thinking about doing the same thing with some of the fruit I grow in my yard.
I’m certainly willing to give this a shot on a small batch (I have 1-gal fermenters I use for test batches). With the fruit fermentation, how do I make the ‘wine?’ We have some prunes that are gonna be ready in a few weeks, I could use those. Just mash them up and leave them in a fermenter with a bunch of sugar and an airlock?
I was thinking of airborne wild yeasts. Like you said, wild yeasts on fruit skins tend to be better fermentors, although they might still be “powdery” and reluctant to flocc. It’s not just grapes, either; I’ve made and tasted plenty of batches of decent cider fermented using only the wild yeasts.
The problem is that fermenting beer with yeasts adapted to fermenting fruit juice produces beer with an odd wine-like taste. It works, but not that well. Conversely, producing cider using ale yeast works fairly well. I guess if you were to do a sour beer, starting with wild fruit yeast, then add a blend of lactic, pedio, brett, etc. bugs the vinous taste might blend in, though.
But you’re absolutely right. If you want to work with a wild yeast and produce a truly local, artisanal product, you can’t get more basic than wine or cider.
@ Tom: Wild yeast native to fruit skins generally isn’t Brett. It tends to be strains of Saccharomyces Bayanus among other things. You’d need to do a lot of work to isolate just one strain of wild yeast from fruit skin. The good news is that most wild yeasts croak out at low ABV, so S. Bayanus and/or Cerevesiae have an advantage since they can stand higher ABV levels.
What about taking a wild yeast strain a la the fruit-wine method and then having it ferment out for a few generations? I’m not in a hurry… I know that ‘house yeasts’ at least from a brewery standpoint can eventually evolve to better handle their environments. I don’t know what yeast mutation rates are, but given the population size and the average lifespan, I don’t see why we couldn’t see mutation towards a more beer-friendly yeast in less than 4 or 5 fermentations. It’d make for an interesting experiment anyway.
I also wonder if it wouldn’t work to sort of ‘interbreed’ a wild yeast with a small culture of lab yeast that has the characteristics I’m looking for. But given that they produce by budding as opposed to Missionary-style, this may not work. I Am Not A Microbiologist (although I play one on TV!)
Here’s what I’ve done: Carefully and as sanitary as possible, skin a peach and quarter the skin. I guess this could work with individual grapes, too, if you don’t have peaches. I made a starter solution of about 1.020 gravity. Put each piece of skin into 3/4 of a quart of starter (that’s about 700ml).
After a few days, some of the starters will turn green/gray and smell awful. Some of them will stay wort colored and smell like beer. Step up the beer-scented starters to 1l and 1.040. If it’s still good after that starter is done fermenting, you can pitch into your beer.
The yeast flocc’ed in big pea-sized chunks. It was a strong fermenter, faster than average for the commercial strains I’ve used. It flocc’ed out better than average too. I made a wit with it, but was disappointed in the flavor. I was expecting the phenols/esters to be over the top, but it was actually pretty neutral. Mildly fruity but not nearly as phenolic as most Belgian strains. A bit of higher alcohols, but I fermented pretty warm, around 75*. Overall a good flavor, but nothing special.
I did have a few bottles I kept for a long time, and after about 6-7 months in the bottle, I noticed a very low-level acetobacter infection in some of the bottles. It could just have been my sanitation, but it may also have been on the peach skins in the first place.
Trust your nose and gut at every step. It won’t behave exactly like commercial yeast, but if at any step it looks or smells “bad” toss it out and start over.
So where did a brewery get it’s yeast back in 1850 or so? Did they just use wild yeast over and over again for a few hundred years until it mutated into something that made good beer?
Brett is native to many fruit skins - maybe not all fruit, and maybe not as populous as other strains, but still present. It would be fairly easy to isolate a single strain, you can just plate it and streak for singles. The trick to me is how to tell brett from sacch using things your average homebrewer has access to.
How are you differentiating between S. bayanus/cerevisiae found on the fruit skins and “wild” yeast?
This could work, but would be pretty hard to do. The wild sacch strains should sporulate without a problem, but the spores will tend to mate with other spores of the opposite mating type. The way you would do it in the lab is to knock out the mating type switching locus so that each haploid mother would produce daughters of only one mating type. Then you can sporulate and dissect the tetrad and get separate colonies of both mating types. After that you can cross them with spores from other strains.
However, getting viable isolates from a beer strain is even more difficult. Most of the strains I’ve tested don’t form spores at all. Of those that do, none had viable tetrads. Some of the spores would grow, but never more than 2 of the 4. So you’d have the same problem as above and need to knock out HO, but you’ve also got to get lucky on the spores. In some cases it just might not be possible. Most beer strains exhibit aneuploidy, meaning that they have different numbers of each chromosome - so they might have 2 copies of chromosome 2, 4, and 12, but 3 copies of 5, 6, and 14, and just 1 copy of 7, 8, and 9, etc. Beyond that - even if you got viable spores, there is no guarantee that the genes would segregate such that beer made with those spores will be any good.
In general it would be much easier to stress the yeast or use a mutagen to alter the genes at random, then select isolates and do test ferments and find one that you like. It would be tedious, but I think it would have a much higher chance of success.
You have to go back a lot farther than the 1850s, but yes, it was more of a trial and error thing. Beer was often fermented in wooden vessels which would harbor yeast. If a vessel was known for making bad beer you’d get rid of it and make a new one. Going back, brewers may have used a stick to stir the wort, and the stick would harbor yeast too, effectively inoculating the wort.
I just make a small 2 gallon batch, usually out of muscadines. Just measure the juice and add sugar to get it up to ~14% and let the natural yeast do its thing. I will add some nutrient. I then take the cake and use it like one from a batch of beer and make a malt starter.
I know its best to grow yeast in the enviroment it will ferment in but I have never used malt to “extract” the wild yeast for fear of the alchohol content not being high enough to kill other stuff off. I have been thinking of trying it with a high gravity malt & friut though, using DME to get the % up instead of cane sugar.
Like someone else said, this is not going to taste like the beer yeast you are used to, its not US-05.
I didn’t say it tasted good, just that it would work ;D
On the left side is a wall of haploid yeast of mating type alpha* (MATalpha). The rod-like things you see are individual yeast cells of mating type a*. They are responding to a mating pheromone called alpha-factor secreted by the MATalpha cells. The cell begins to shmoo (I’m not making this up) toward the opposite mating type. Normally this wouldn’t happen at that distance, but the abundance of MATalpha cells creates a large amount and causes the MATa cells to respond. The small amount of pheromone secreted by the MATa cells is not enough to get the MATalpha cells to respond from that far away.
Fun stuff, eh? ;D
*Don’t get me started on the “logic” of having mating types call “a” and “alpha”.
Yep, it’s a scientific term. ;) It’s based on an old cartoon, because it’s sort of what the yeast look like when they start to grow toward the other cell.
Microbiologists are AWESOME! Okay yes is seems like a type A and a type Alpha is waiting for a type Gerbil and a type lemon Popsicle. I have often suspected quantum physicists of partaking of their chemist friends best stuff, I suppose a good microbiologist doesn’t even need help.
You’re right, it’s perfectly possible to have a “wild” variant of S. bayanus/cerevisiae which won’t behave well when fermenting beer. I was thinking of other genera of yeasts that don’t work well for any fermented beverage.
Tom is basically correct, but by 1700, the large brewers had a pretty keen idea of how yeast worked and how to culture it, although they still didn’t know precisely what it was. (That would have to wait until 1876 when Louis Pasteur published “Etudes sur la Bière.”) In addition to the methods Tom has mentioned, breweries often borrowed yeast cultures from each other. House breweries often used bread yeast for beer and vice-versa, so homebrewers could get yeast from their local baker.
By the middle of the 19th century, the big breweries also had elaborate “clarifying” systems which could also be used to harvest yeast, such as Yorkshire Squares or Burton Unions. To some extent, yeast strains were influenced by this equipment.
Brewing using pure strains of yeast in brewing dates to 1883 when when Emil Hannsen figured out how to isolate individual yeast strains. Despite this, many brewers continued to use blends of different yeast strains (including Brett strains!) until the 1950s.
Martyn Cornell (Zythophile) has also written a couple of very good books. “Amber, Gold and Black” is a nice, concise and up to date history of British brewing.