Yeast immobilization: magic beans of fermentation

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Completely random question, but could this be done with flavorless gelatin? Additionally, wouldn't this be good for those of us who don't have the space/funds for ferm temp control? If the yeast can only ferment at the pace the solution passes through the membrane, temp shouldn't get out of control, right?
 
Titan88 said:
Completely random question, but could this be done with flavorless gelatin? Additionally, wouldn't this be good for those of us who don't have the space/funds for ferm temp control? If the yeast can only ferment at the pace the solution passes through the membrane, temp shouldn't get out of control, right?
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I don't have much experience with gelatin, but I've never seen it get as firm as these beads are. They really feel like a plastic polymer of some sort. I have to imagine that gelatin would become a soupy mess.

Your speculation on temperatures sounds plausible, but really I have no idea. Based on my experiences, I'm confident that these beads will ferment beer, but everything beyond that is just a guess.

I will do more experimenting at some point, but it might be a while! Right now, my nearest homebrew show is thousands of miles away, so I'm not able to do much until I get around to figuring out how to malt my own barley.
 
NJbeer said:
came across this,
https://squareup.com/market/ruckus-fermentation
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That's the same guy/guys from the MuPor thread, fyi. Looks like they finally got a business together. But what's disappointing is the lack of information in terms of "how it works". I can't even find what their yeast strand is they are using.

Did anyone out there ever finish their own experiments with the technique Malfet outlined in the OP? I know someone was going to try this with some Brett strains, I'd be very interested in those results.
 
geoffey said:
That's the same guy/guys from the MuPor thread, fyi. Looks like they finally got a business together. But what's disappointing is the lack of information in terms of "how it works". I can't even find what their yeast strand is they are using.

Did anyone out there ever finish their own experiments with the technique Malfet outlined in the OP? I know someone was going to try this with some Brett strains, I'd be very interested in those results.
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was that thread deleted?
 
NJbeer said:
was that thread deleted?
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Yes. From what I recall they posted on here originally asking for some members of HBT to volunteer to try a new fermentation technology. They weren't very forthcoming about details when asked. Then it turned into a kickstarter campaign and they were asking people for money here out of the blue.

Or something like that. The OP (if you read this thread) insisted that as he never had any info on what the Mupor technology was and therefore wasn't able to speculate on whether or not the experiments detailed in this thread were at all related.
 
MalFet said:
Yeast stand up to acid relatively well, which is the principle behind acid washing.
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Starsan absolutely destroys yeast. The detergent opens up the cell to allow the acid in.That is how starsan kills, it's not just acid.
 
I tested washing us-05 with starsan at twice the dilution rate (weak). All my yeasties insides were on the outside after that :(

There is a brew strong episode on sanitation with five star where the chemist that invented the stuff describes how it kills (see above). It has to kill yeast or else it wouldn't sell because of all the wild yeast infections people would end up with in their beer.
 
cjgenever said:
It has to kill yeast or else it wouldn't sell because of all the wild yeast infections people would end up with in their beer.
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Exactly the opposite- if star-san killed yeast, you wouldn't be able to bottle condition a beer, as it's a 'wet contact' sanitizer, and we all bottle when the bottle is wet with sanitizer. We also sanitize our brewgear, and it's still wet with star-san when we add our wort and yeast to the fermenter.

It may kill some strains of wild yeast, and not brewer's yeast, but I wouldn't even say that would be a sure thing.
 
Yooper said:
Exactly the opposite- if star-san killed yeast, you wouldn't be able to bottle condition a beer, as it's a 'wet contact' sanitizer, and we all bottle when the bottle is wet with sanitizer. We also sanitize our brewgear, and it's still wet with star-san when we add our wort and yeast to the fermenter.

It may kill some strains of wild yeast, and not brewer's yeast, but I wouldn't even say that would be a sure thing.
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I always thought that worked because as soon as you put beer (or wort) in that container, the starsan is instantly diluted so it no longer works to kill the yeast in solution.
 
Yooper said:
Exactly the opposite- if star-san killed yeast, you wouldn't be able to bottle condition a beer, as it's a 'wet contact' sanitizer, and we all bottle when the bottle is wet with sanitizer. We also sanitize our brewgear, and it's still wet with star-san when we add our wort and yeast to the fermenter.

It may kill some strains of wild yeast, and not brewer's yeast, but I wouldn't even say that would be a sure thing.
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Star-san will kill yeast but not at the diluted concentration that is in the bottle filled with beer. Same with sanitizing our gear, star-san at mixed concentration kills yeast on our gear. But when we add wort or beer the star-san is immediately diluted to a concentration that is harmless.

Anyone still unsure. Make a starter wort, add the recommended amount of star-san concentrate for the volume of wort. Add yeast and see if your starter starts.

One possible problem with my proposed experiment is that the wort might buffer the star-san in a way water does not so it does not reach the "killing" acidity. So it would be a better test if you have PH testing equipment to mix a batch of star-san according to directions. Record PH, this is the control PH. Now mix your starter wort and add star-san concentrate until the wort PH reaches the control PH. Then proceed with making your starter.
 
+1, Star San at the proper concentration kills yeast. It's not just the pH, it's a chemical reaction that actual deals the critical blow.

A good explanation is on StackExchange. Here is the relevant bit:

Star-San kills yeast. Star-san doesn't discriminate across different microbes. Despite that yeast can survive a pH2 solution, the pH is not the killing action of StarSan, its the redox reaction on the cell membranes of microbes that does the killing. The low pH is just what indicates that StarSan is active, not how it kills.
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rlmiller10 said:
Anyone still unsure. Make a starter wort, add the recommended amount of star-san concentrate for the volume of wort. Add yeast and see if your starter starts.
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Like I have posted. There are reports of exactly this kind of thing happening. Different yeasts will have different tolerance levels to StarSan or any other sanitizer. Please familiarize yourself with the difference between sanitation and sterilization. Sanitation does not guarantee 100% kill as you seem to think you are getting anyhow. I don't think StarSan would be reckless enough to make that claim. It is a best effort kind of thing. If you start with a clean surface and rinse it down with sanitizer then more stuff will die or get weakened or simply rinse off. Given time it may indeed come closer to sterilization levels but it will never achieve that.

Think of it this way. Put a dead mouse in a carboy. Autoclave that sucker and you can rack beer onto it without fear of contamination. Put a dead mouse in a carboy and fill it with StarSan for a week and try. You will most likely end up with an infected batch. You are overstating what StarSan can do.

When we sanitize we recognize it as a 'good enough' solution to a particular problem. I think this is often the cause of people reporting a batch, sometimes years old, suddenly going bad.
 
I don't think he was claiming, and I know that I wasn't claiming, StarSan kills 100% of yeast or any other microbe. It kills yeast equally as efficiently as it kills other microbes, though. That's why it works - because it destroys the cell membrane.

The dead mouse idea is a red herring. Why would anyone do that? StarSan doesn't sterilize, and no one here or at Five Star has made that claim as far as I'm aware.

So yes, in sanitizing, a certain small percentage of cells survive and people have successfully made starters and propagated those surviving cells. You could do the same thing with a bacterial culture. It doesn't change the fact that StarSan kills bacteria, and that it also kills yeast, and it does so quite efficiently otherwise it would be pretty useless in brewing.

Further reading (it's an acid anionic sanitizer): http://books.google.com/books?id=lC...ge&q=acid anionic sanitizer mechanism&f=false

The long-and-short of that article is that it's effective against bacteria, yeasts, and molds. Saccharomyces is specifically included in the "yeasts" category in the article.
 
I'm really interested to hear back on the experiments with the dead mouse in the autoclave. Never would have imagined you could make good beer with a dead mouse. I learn so much here...


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew
 
Given time starsan will kill them all. I used a starsan solution diluted 100% (about 5ph) and left for 24 hrs to see what happens. They were turned to sludge in eight hours. I added starter wort after rinsing with distilled water. Left out at 70° for two weeks.absolutely nothing.

And yes, the acid does the killing. The sufactant/detergent disables the cell walls ability to monitor fluids in/out. The acid then enters the cell (carried by the sufactant) for the kill.
 
cjgenever said:
Starsan absolutely destroys yeast. The detergent opens up the cell to allow the acid in.That is how starsan kills, it's not just acid.
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cjgenever said:
Given time starsan will kill them all. I used a starsan solution diluted 100% (about 5ph) and left for 24 hrs to see what happens. They were turned to sludge in eight hours. I added starter wort after rinsing with distilled water. Left out at 70° for two weeks.absolutely nothing.

And yes, the acid does the killing. The sufactant/detergent disables the cell walls ability to monitor fluids in/out. The acid then enters the cell (carried by the sufactant) for the kill.
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My understanding was that the surfactant janked up metabolic activity directly and that the acid was mostly necessary to create proper ionic gradient. Is that not correct? I certainly could be wrong, as this stuff gets above my knowhow very quickly. My only real source on sanitation beyond gossip is Principles of Food Sanitation, which seems to suggest on page 180 that anionic detergents have poor action on yeast.

In any case, I'm sure leaving your beads in starsan for 24 hours will kill your yeast (not to mention break up the binding agent...hence the sludge), but for the time periods involved here I've never observed any negative effects on yeast (even with a microscope and hemocytometer).
 
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I don't remember the concepts behind it, just that the two active ingredients work together to kill both bacteria and yeast. My info comes from the previously referenced brew strong episode along with my unscientific experiences. I've got lots of extra farmed yeast at home.I'll run an experiment for everyone next weekend...

-Rinse healthy yeast in starsan solution for recommended contact time. -Account for water mass with yeast when mixing solution.
-add to appropriate amount of wort to bring ph back up to normal wort levels since yeast will be pitched with starsan (to avoid prolonged exposure).
-Control to use equal amount of yeast from same harvesting container
-equal amount of appropriate starsan solution to be pitched into control
-both to be fermented side by side

It may also be beneficial to perform further experiments with longer exposure times to find the actual kill threshold (time)

Of course, this would be more definitive with lab equipment.hint hint;)
 
Yes, if someone had access to a hemocytometer we could get some real data. I was seriously under the impression that starsan didn't affect yeast viability.
 
Great thread!

It is my understanding that Star San will kill yeast. However, since Star San becomes inert (and cloudy) at a Ph of 3 it does not kill yeast that is in a beer/cider/wine suspension.
 
One could always try doing this in a fume hood then right? Not that most of us have access to such a thing, but it should be buildable I would imagine? Then just using sanitized/sterilized equipment during the making of the balls, and all would be good right?

I'm just guessing and don't actually know anything about this stuff lol.

But this sounds like an awesome thing to mess around with some day. Maybe make a batch of something split into several smaller fermentations with different magic bean yeast ball types and see the effect each yeast strain still have on the wort.
 
MalFet said:
My understanding was that the surfactant janked up metabolic activity directly and that the acid was mostly necessary to create proper ionic gradient. Is that not correct? I certainly could be wrong, as this stuff gets above my knowhow very quickly. My only real source on sanitation beyond gossip is Principles of Food Sanitation, which seems to suggest on page 180 that anionic detergents have poor action on yeast.

In any case, I'm sure leaving your beads in starsan for 24 hours will kill your yeast (not to mention break up the binding agent...hence the sludge), but for the time periods involved here I've never observed any negative effects on yeast (even with a microscope and hemocytometer).
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this all is 100% false. Star san will do nothing to your yeast. I quit using boiled water and started using the leftover star san from bottling to wash my yeast years ago. I have never had a problem. I wash as anyone would normally do, but instead of boiling water, i dump in the left over star san i made up for bottling. I have done this hundreds of times, and have never had yeast die from it. I actually made a pumpkin ale last month with star san washed yeast that was almost a year old. Went from 1061 to 1012 in 4 days. I store it in regular sized mason jars with nothing but yeast and star san mix in them. Never had a problem
 
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I'd wager that once your star san hits the yeast slurry, the P.H. instantly goes too high and your star san is basically cloudy water with no killing ability. Next time, put your slurry into jars and settle it out. Decant the liquid and pitch a tbs full of slurry into a mason jar full of properly mixed star san and see what happens to your yeast...

Star san has to kill yeast or else you'd never be able to make a batch of beer with a low attenuating strain of yeast with the same gear you used to make a batch with a high attenuating yeast strain. If the star san didn't kill the high attenuating strain, it would always end up fermenting your wort to its attenuation level. You'd also never be able to make a beer with a neutral yeast after using a Belgian etc...
 
SmokeyMcBong said:
I'd wager that once your star san hits the yeast slurry, the P.H. instantly goes too high and your star san is basically cloudy water with no killing ability. Next time, put your slurry into jars and settle it out. Decant the liquid and pitch a tbs full of slurry into a mason jar full of properly mixed star san and see what happens to your yeast...

Star san has to kill yeast or else you'd never be able to make a batch of beer with a low attenuating strain of yeast with the same gear you used to make a batch with a high attenuating yeast strain. If the star san didn't kill the high attenuating strain, it would always end up fermenting your wort to its attenuation level. You'd also never be able to make a beer with a neutral yeast after using a Belgian etc...
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I guess that makes sense. All I care about is the jars are sanitized, and the wash water is sanitized. If it gets neutralized after hitting the slurry, dont matter to me. There will be no infection and thats what I care about. It started when I went to wash some slurry years ago, and forgot to boil water. I didnt have time to boil and cool, so I just said screw it. And used star san. It worked, so I continued to do it that way to this day.

BTW love the name. We would get along just fine :)
 
SmokeyMcBong said:
Star san has to kill yeast or else you'd never be able to make a batch of beer with a low attenuating strain of yeast with the same gear you used to make a batch with a high attenuating yeast strain. If the star san didn't kill the high attenuating strain, it would always end up fermenting your wort to its attenuation level. You'd also never be able to make a beer with a neutral yeast after using a Belgian etc...
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That's not necessarily true. Yeast growth is exponential, but the dynamics of that growth are shaped by environmental factors. The most important of these factors is the density of available food. If food is abundant, you'll get the kind of explosive reproduction we all see with a good pitch. When the food starts to dwindle (but before it's actually gone), the yeast will drastically cut back on metabolic activity and wait for new opportunities to feed and breed. Yeast populations have evolved to be very strategic about how far they'll attenuate our wort, and they will drop into a low energy state well before it is metabolically necessary for a number of different potential reasons.

If your neutral yeast is pitched in proper quantities, it will eat the vast bulk of the food before the trace Belgian colonies go through enough reproduction cycles to be a meaningful presence. They're almost certainly still there, though. So are acetobacter, lactobacillus, and pediococcus, all of which are ubiquitous in the environment. StarSan can't kill everything, but so long as competing populations are small enough that's perfectly fine. In the absence of true sterilization techniques, all beer is infected; properly prepared beer, however, will spoil only very, very slowly.
 
Starsan works as a sanitizer because of it's low pH, which kills yeast when they in very small numbers. If you're adding it to an equal amount of slurry (give or take), the pH of the overal mixture will balance out and most of the yeast will survive. As mentioned, acid washing is common in a lab environment. For us homebrewers there is no reason to move yeast from the beer into water, Starsan, or any other liquid (unless freezing or slanting, etc.). Yeast is perfectly happy living under the beer that they fine tuned to their liking. Why transplant them to a new environment completely devoid of nutrients and with who knows what pH? Trub is actually beneficial to yeast colony health and future generations will be happy you left some in there. I'm not sure why trub has been so demonized by homebrewers. Anyway, this has all been debated ad nauseum on other threads.

I am very intrigued by the idea of immobilized yeast for our purposes and look forward to further discussion.
 
Just read this entire thread for the first time and am happy at the ideas that have come from it. I wish someone had done a series of very detailed experiments re: the ideas of immobilizing bugs by this point so I could be reasonably confident in trying that :) As is, I might give this a shot for my next hoppy beer.
 
Gave this a shot in a little shy of 6gals of 1.077 DIPA (with plans of adding some turbinado during ferment). Scaled the OP's batch size up 2x and created two batches (total = 4 packs of S-05). Figure it's still underpitching, but given the nature of the immobilized yeast, thinking that may just make for a long ferment more than anything else in this case.

Was hard with the syringes I bought to drop in a consistent, small ball, and with the amount of solution we were dealing with, it took a while and we got impatient at times. But still fun and we'll see what happens. It was outgassing within 10 minutes of pitching and has been outgassing at a consistent if not slow-ish rate. No real krausen, the bubbles you see in the pic below were at about 24hrs.


LKJX6flg503YYfINAfDbZAfdlHAeYt5aVzBa6fE8eqs=w1287-h965-no
 
So glad to see this topic brought back to life.

So here's a thought (and maybe it was brought up but I missed it): if this immobilization technique greatly reduces ester formation, then does fermentation temperature control become far less critical? From what I've seen the immobilized yeast balls worked slower in side-by-side tests vs. normally pitched yeast at typical fermentation temperature...but what if you could run the yeast ball fermentation at ambient temperature--or even warmed, maybe even 90+°F?--and still get a clean flavor profile? I imagine it would HAVE to run faster at elevated temp?
 

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