Comment on I've made a yeast lab in Finland
plactagonic@sopuli.xyz 5 hours agoIt is maybe a little more assuring for me to go for yeast directly from brewery where I can directly talk to someone.
I had some issues with yeasts because the shipping was really slow and it was dry yeasts. These live ones I tried few times and always it was refrigerated on route (covered in cold packs and still cold). I really can’t imagine that it will survive in summer.
So it is maybe only mine prejudice and that I can get good yeasts more locally.
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
I completely agree that keeping yeast supply lines as local as possible is a good idea, both in terms of distance, and in terms of time. That’s the concept here - if we can’t get fresh local yeast, then we should make them.
Getting yeast from breweries is good idea, but first, those should ideally come from in-brewery lab, not from propagation (unless it’s some kind of local native yeast, I suppose) - fresh lab-propagated yeast always behave much better according to my experience and to literature, also lines tend to mutate or degenerate otherwise without proper single-cell cleaning step occasionally.
Second, as far as I understand, most breweries keep very small selection of yeast. One of the reasons we’ve got into cultivation of pure varietal yeast is a realization of yeast’s impact on final product profile. This was quite a story.
At that point we were much younger and we’ve doubted that yeast could make lots of impact on fermentation profile, much less dominate it, as literature occasionally claims. Once we’ve decided to compare several different strains of yeast in mead; we’ve taken the most straightforward starting material - honey from Texas where we lived back then, that’s got all possible flowers blooming almost year round mixed together so that no single flavor could be distinguished - turned it into a must, then divided it into 8 batches and pitched them with different wine yeasts. Expecting subtle difference, we were surprised to find that some turned out like mead, but others were slightly honey-flavored Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sovignon, Riesling, etc. That was the day we’ve started thinking about building yeast library. Now we keep tasting (I mean, perform organoleptic analysis, it’s science!) plain pilsner 1040OG wort with no additions but yeast - and every new strain brings something new, while old strains become as familiar as friends. It’s a whole world.
plactagonic@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
In commercial brewing it usually goes from lab (seed sample for propagating) to some bigger brewery with propagation station. Smaller brewerys buy the propagated yeast from them.
So we have labs that hold the samples and brewerys that propagate them at scale - it isn’t some second grade.
When I want to try some unusual strains, I buy dried. It is more stable but it needs more time to get started.