Comment on I've made a yeast lab in Finland
antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Given your proximity to Kveik and other farmhouse strains, it would be cool to focus on the preservation of them. Kveik in particular is very easy to store and ship because it survives desiccation well. It would be very interesting to figure out which genes are responsible for desiccation hardiness, and put them into other strains. There’s a lab in California specializing in GMO brewing yeast: berkeleyyeast.com
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
That would be cool indeed! Would you suggest some particular brews we should chase?
One strategy to catch new strains is to give friends that go traveling a couple of plastic test tubes and ask them to save a drop of beer for us. We’ve got quite a lot of acetic and lactic bacteria this way, of course, but some yeasts too.
GMO yeast distribution has questionable legality here as far as I understand, but it doesn’t mean it’s illegal to make and study it. I’ve been looking for some projects to finally play with CRISPR and lyophilization chamber somebody at our lab was building for no particular purpose (we’ve bargained a sizeable set of used but surprisingly operational Edwards vacuum pumps at ebay, they itch to build something out of them).
Seriously, after seeing feedback here, I’m thinking about selling dry yeast as well, since it’s not too much of an upgrade and we can build a stock just for the sake of spreading strains around the globe…
antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
I would suggest contacting Lars Garshol, who has really changed the known world of farmhouse yeast. There may yet be some more to discover in Finland.