Wild yeast from blueberries?

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keithbeats

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Has anyone tried this? I have been eager to try a Apfelwein with a wild yeast and thought blueberries have yeast on them, so why not? I've made many of Edwort's but wanted to try something different, plus I'm too lazy to go to Brewcraft right now. I would love to hear from anyone who has tried it!
:mug:
 
There are a couple of threads I've read of people doing something similar, I think from juniper berries.
 
If you do this, please report back with your results. I'm probably going to try it out this summer, too, since I usually go picking blueberries when hanging out at the in-laws' in eastern Canada.

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There's definitely wild yeast on blueberries, I'd recommend making a number of small test jars with some sugary liquid (apple juice or wort) and a dash of yeast nutrient and energizer and dropping a few blueberries in each and capping with an airlock. Watch each batch, some may grow mold so you don't want to pitch that into your large batch.

I did this with wine grapes and got a nice strain of wild yeast on the third try. This yeast has just finished up fermenting a Belgian style Wit.

Good luck!
 
I was planning to use a q-tip dipped in sterile water to swab the blueberries, then use that to streak some agar plates. Any promising looking yeast colonies would then be added to wort starters and stepped up.

However, since that would require me bringing (or making) agar plates over a brief (long weekend) vacation, I might just go with some wort instead.
 
If you use a hopped wort that will inhibit the growth of some spoilage microorganisms as well.

I used apple juice when I captured mine though.
 
Ok. So I started this on March 1st and now it is March 5th and guess what? It has started! The balloon I have on the opening of the bottle is growing! All I did was throw the smashed blueberries in the one gallon Treetop plastic bottle with a pound of brown sugar. I really wanted to do something interesting for myself, so I wanted to go spartan style to see what would happen if you only grabbed items from the grocery store Safeway. (They call it Dateway out here in the Marina, SF because of all the hot blondes. There's also a Safeway in the Fillmore district, which has been renamed UnSafeway.)

I am not even using an airlock. Just a balloon courtesy of Pabst Blue Ribbon. (My friend is a field marketing manager there) I am going to wait it out and see what happens. I think it will come out fine though. Thanks!
 
My first attempts at wine making was about 38 years ago, and that was what I did. Blueberries and sugar in a jug behind the stove made wine that even my buddies got drunk on. I was a hit in high school making wine for weekends.
 
And there she is! haha, bubbling away.

treetop-e1299442233847.jpg
 
Turned to yummy vinegar. :rolleyes:
I have another one going with some yeast from a wit. Looks good so far.
 
im working with a buddy of mine this summer to identify, isolate and culture wild yeast strands from various fruits. I've currently got an erlenmeyer with blueberries in 400mls of an apprx 33% w/v sugar water solution with about a teaspoon of yeast extract hangin out in the closet doin its thing.
 
There are a couple of threads I've read of people doing something similar, I think from juniper berries.

It is here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/can-i-culture-yeast-juniper-berries-169156/

It worked good for me, I'm still using it and will start isolating through natural selection some different strains from it. You can potentially get tens or hundreds of different saccaromyces from the process. If I do it from scratch again, I will use only one berry and build from there.:mug:
 
I have been reading and watching youtube videos about the way korean and japanese cuisine ferments with "natural" (read: wild) yeast for both breads and vegetable fermentation. I tried this technique with blueberries that my wife and daughter picked the other day. They were late in the season, so many were soft and ultra-sweet.

I added about a 1/4 cup of freshly picked blueberries from a local farm to a jar of filtered tap water, and have been shaking the hell out of it just like a starter.Within 12 hours I started to see some signs of fermentation; berries lifting to the top, with CO2 escaping. By the third day I'm smelling the ethanol, and the activity is building steadily.

I figured it's yeast attracted to the sugars and nutrients in blueberry skin, so it's probably most effective at fermenting that. Once this gets going, I will pitch it into a pint or so of 1.050 hopped wort, just like a starter (only smaller). I'm thinking it would have been smart to get an initial gravity reading of the weak blueberry juice to get an idea how strong this yeast mixture is.
 
Recently tried this with some concord grapes from my yard and some sage brush needles.

I put a small amount of starter wort (1.030 and lightly hopped) into a white labs vial and put two grapes into two of them and a pinch of sage brush needles into each. Covered each with tinfoil and let them ferment out. They all smelled decent so I pitched each of them into 1 gallon batches of Belgian Pale Ale.

From the 1 gallon batches it looks like I got one successful harvest. A nice sort of bubble gummy smell and a nice fully fermented wort. The other 3 each had issues, one was very burnt rubber like, another was slightly smoky, the third didn't really ferment completely. Two of them finished really clear (one grape, one sagebrush).

I'm going to pitch the winner into a 5 gallon batch soon.
 
I have been interested in this topic for a while now! I wanted to hit up a couple farms today in attempt to grab some ripe local fruit with wild yeast on them. I think it's near the end of blueberry season in Michigan... However- since my backyard is bursting with Concord grapes, it makes sense to try this!! Groom- stoked to hear that you got some results! Any other fruit/herbs that this could work with?


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I have since successfully harvested wild yeast from dates, cherries, juniper berries, wild grapes, and raw honey. I've been so successful in harvesting such excellent wild yeasts that I've yet to purchase any commercial yeast for brewing this year.
 
I've gotta say I'm incredibly psyched by what seems to be a movement building an incredible amount of inertia in the US brewing community. Primarily driven by homebrewers and bubbling up (pun intended) to craft brewers. The cultivation of wild American yeasts for brewing is something that I don't think has happened in over a hundred years. And certainly never on this scale. The dawn of a new era, my friends! This has the potential to radically change beer in this country.

I'm interested in learning more about people's techniques: Is a small sample of weak wort most effective for starting the yeast, or has anyone tried a similar approach to mine? Is anyone isolating individual strains with Agar plates, or just using the redneck approach like me? How would you do a honey harvest: throw a glob of honey into a starter?



Also, what kind of fermentation should I expect when I pitch this into a beer? I've heard they tend to run longer and attenuate strongly. The owner of Mystic told me that wild yeasts tend to work, stall, then pick up again. His rationale for this was that wild yeasts go through a sexual reproduction phase first, then switch to asexual when the sugars get low. Brewers yeast strains have bred this characteristic out of them.

Thanks a ton for keeping this going, and for the encouraging info!

BTW, my blueberry liquor is running along beautifully. Fermentation is not vigorous, but steady, and the yeast is a light fluffy cloud at the bottom of the jar. Wonderful sweet blueberry aroma; the sourness has all disappeared.
 
I've gotta say I'm incredibly psyched by what seems to be a movement building an incredible amount of inertia in the US brewing community. Primarily driven by homebrewers and bubbling up (pun intended) to craft brewers. The cultivation of wild American yeasts for brewing is something that I don't think has happened in over a hundred years. And certainly never on this scale. The dawn of a new era, my friends! This has the potential to radically change beer in this country.

I'm interested in learning more about people's techniques: Is a small sample of weak wort most effective for starting the yeast, or has anyone tried a similar approach to mine? Is anyone isolating individual strains with Agar plates, or just using the redneck approach like me? How would you do a honey harvest: throw a glob of honey into a starter?



Also, what kind of fermentation should I expect when I pitch this into a beer? I've heard they tend to run longer and attenuate strongly. The owner of Mystic told me that wild yeasts tend to work, stall, then pick up again. His rationale for this was that wild yeasts go through a sexual reproduction phase first, then switch to asexual when the sugars get low. Brewers yeast strains have bred this characteristic out of them.

Thanks a ton for keeping this going, and for the encouraging info!

BTW, my blueberry liquor is running along beautifully. Fermentation is not vigorous, but steady, and the yeast is a light fluffy cloud at the bottom of the jar. Wonderful sweet blueberry aroma; the sourness has all disappeared.

I've been looking low and high for this kind of thread topic. My partner and I harvest wild yeasts from all over the forest and our farm. We have harvested yeast from salmonberry, thimbleberry flower, yarrow flower, blue elderberry flower, lavender flower, honeysuckle flower, and much more. The possibilities are endless, and although certain pollenators carry their own unique yeasts, it seems that their interaction with flowers also propagate unique yeasts. We make mostly meads/melomels/metheglyns and use a 30% water/honey mixture to culture the yeasts. Then we pick our favorites and pitch them into larger batches. Our friend, who taught us this method brought over a brocolli flower yeast that we pitched into a blackberry melomel and the results are so far superb. I'd love to hear more about successes and failures of those of you who cultivate wild yeasts.
 
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