Howto: Capture Wild Yeast

What aged hops will do is decelerate the growth of the kinds of bacteria you don't want, while still letting the ones you do want do their fair share of the work. I personally would not waste them on your actual culturing wort since they seem to be a prized commodity, but instead I would use them to brew your wild beer when the time comes that you have a culture that you like the smells and tastes from.

I'm digging this thread!
I live on the last bastion of civilization in Central Maine, before the Moose out-populate the people.
...and there are some awesome looking shelf like fungi growing on the trees around here.

Add it all up, I wanna make a 5-10 gal coolship now!
:rockin:

Do you get amanita muscarias?

Pith said:

Do you get amanita muscarias?

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...kinda...
No, I believe the species that I have growing around my place have to be a heartier, more resilient to long cold winters type.
I live in far North New England, US.
I have a couple different shelf like growing on various trees. One of which is as hard as bone, and roughly 12 in' across. in a giant semi-circle. (Conk?)
Quite a few ground, lightly brown, "droopy" common fungi, along with the common white with the large flat cap.
I have some in the yard that are little balls, filled with black seeds. (Similar to a pomegranate.)

Also are misc, white globs of what I'm guessing will become other shelf fungi.

I was kinda kidding. But I'm tempted to put amanitas in a beer one day. I just bought Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher, which has 4 mushroom beer recipes in it that I could probably adapt.

Just used my wild starter to inoculate a wheat beer, ill let you all know how she turns out !!!

Aschecte said:

Just used my wild starter to inoculate a wheat beer, ill let you all know how she turns out !!!

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Hmm, good luck. Such a delicate flavour as wheat may leave your culture being brutally honest about its personality. But yeah, definitely write back.

Pith said:

Such a delicate flavour as wheat may leave your culture being brutally honest about its personality.

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hahah!

Oh cool thread, wherefore have you been hiding from me? Must resist the temptation to waste my entire day looking at it...

Well my first attempt at growing a wild yeast failed when all I got on my plate was mold. I will have to try again, maybe this time under a tree and not under the overhang of my apartment building.

I'm not sure how this relates to others experiences using wort to harvest yeast and bacteria, but I collected wild yeast using agar plates. I did everything from leaving the plates outside and uncovered overnight, to covering them with cheesecloth, to simply rubbing fruit, flowers, and other plant material on the plates. I think I got a single colony from all the covered/uncovered plates that I left out. On the other hand I got many colonies when I rubbed fruit, etc directly on the plate. Just my experience.

Update on my three brett 1 gallon testers.
Although I pitched ~10^6-10^7 yeast (OG- ~1.08), it took 3 full days at 65 degrees to get things moving. A week later and the airlock is still bubbling at a very slow rate. The krausen on all three strains was huge. I haven't tasted them yet, but they don't have too funky of a smell. I'm sure it takes time to develop the flavor profile.

I'll post photos if I remember to take them!

I have a question about wild yeast hunting. Does seasonal weather impact the available wild stock in the area? We just had our first cold snap and im wondering if this might have a negative impact on the success rate of a wild harvest.

Thanks guys!

Chromebrew said:

I have a question about wild yeast hunting. Does seasonal weather impact the available wild stock in the area? We just had our first cold snap and im wondering if this might have a negative impact on the success rate of a wild harvest.

Thanks guys!

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I don't know if the weather impacts the viability of local yeast but incoming weather systems will blow other stuff into your area. The temperature will also affect what is more viable at that given time.

If your weather down there is anything like it is up here it's not very cold right now...

I tried and failed several times in winter to catch em. It MIGHT have been the rain.

ReverseApacheMaster said:

I don't know if the weather impacts the viability of local yeast but incoming weather systems will blow other stuff into your area. The temperature will also affect what is more viable at that given time.

If your weather down there is anything like it is up here it's not very cold right now...

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Yeah its been warm recently, i think when i posted that we had our first touch of cold and i thought it might hang around.

I have attempted several times to catch a wild yeast but all i seem to catch is mold and nasties.

I will try it again i guess!

Mmm, I left some heavily hopped wort out at a farm in Mesa Arizona overnight, transfered into a jar and added vodka to raise the alcohol to 3%, a week later I've got high krausen and it's smelling very saison like! Excited to step this one up. It seems likely that Brett and/or Pedio is still lurking in there, I guess I won't know for a month or two without plating or other testing?

Here are some long overdue photos. These are all wild yeast (and other stuff) that were captured by rubbing different things on the plates. Juniper berries, pine cones, Russian sage flowers, rotting crab apples, etc. All plates have cycloheximinde (10-20 ug/ml) and the blue looking plates have brocresol green. I then picked single colonies from these plates and streaked them out. The top streaks on each plate correspond to the photos of the yeast I posted a few pages back. These plates have been sitting in the fridge for a while now, so that's why they are so overgrown.

I did 3 small batches of a simple light wheat recipe and used these two strains (definitely Brett) and another, which I'm not sure what it is (maybe a wild Sacc ?). They are over a month old. I might taste them in a few weeks just to see what kind of flavors are present. They smell kind of weird.

i have a wild fermenting cider going at the moment (i do at least 1 per year), i took a bit of the foamy top surface, diluted, plated out on both DME and DME + chloramphenicol25 + cyclohexamide50. both sets of plates looked exactly the same, with only one colony morphology. the critters look like this. bad pic, i didn't have time to try to get the camera to cooperate, but there they are. no scale bar, 40x objective. anyone know what looks like this, that would grow on CHX?

dinnerstick said:

i have a wild fermenting cider going at the moment (i do at least 1 per year), i took a bit of the foamy top surface, diluted, plated out on both DME and DME + chloramphenicol25 + cyclohexamide50. both sets of plates looked exactly the same, with only one colony morphology. the critters look like this. bad pic, i didn't have time to try to get the camera to cooperate, but there they are. no scale bar, 40x objective. anyone know what looks like this, that would grow on CHX?

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Those lemon shaped ones are Kloeckera Apiculata. They only digest glucose, I think, and they do a lot of the work in a cider fermentation because of this. Theoretically, the ratio of Saccharomyces and other yeasts should increase over the K. apiculata when the latter runs out of things to eat.

cool, thanks for the ID. i'll sample it again in a few weeks. i have it around 12-15 degrees so it's going slowly

On 12/13 I divided hopped, 1.030 wort into three containers, placed one in my attic, one in my cellar, and one in my front yard. On 12/14 I transferred them to growlers and airlocked them.

The one from my attic has seen the fastest growth...of something. At first I was certain it was white mold, but now I'm wondering if it is indeed yeast. There are bubbles coming through.

They started off as a few small, round, white spots on top of the wort and have since multiplied to this:

dinnerstick - Where did you get your bugs for your wild cider? Just off the fruit?
Cool to see Kloeckera apiculata.

they are wild, just off the fruit or maybe from my juicer? it's all from one tree at fatherinlaw's. i'm hoping to isolate a sacc or brett strain and see what else it can do. there's a tiny wild/brett (beer) festival in the summer and people are doing this kind of odd thing for it.
the cider looks and smells the same as my other wild fermented ciders at this point, it's part apple and part spicy/sour french goat's cheese! eventually that tangy smell dissipates

dinnerstick - very neat. I'll have to give that a try some time.

Another question for the thread:

I finally got around to tasting the 3 wild brett fermentations that I have as gallon batches. They are 6 weeks old. One strain has super high attenuation and is very dry and has a strong medicine taste (chlorophenolics?). That's about it for flavor profile. They other two are sweeter, with a bit of fruity sourness and a good bit of the medicine taste, but they aren't terrible. Both are similar, but different. I've never brewed a straight Brett beer before, so my questions is will the medicine taste mellow over time? I know these are young beers and all the other straight Brett beers I've tasted are completely different, i.e., no medicine line flavor.
Thanks.

I've been trying to catch up on this thread the past couple of days but only made it to page 16 so far. I have an experiment going with wild yeasts that I am going to be trying hopefully in the next week or two in some mini wild beer experiments.

I put a picture in the post. From left to right, raspberries, brewers yeast (re-cultivate from spring valley supplements), blueberries, cherries, lindeman's cassis dreg and raisins.

The raspberry and Lindeman's Cassis (blueberry) I am planning on using in two recipes I am developing called "Framboozle" and "Cascetious".

Has anyone else tried this as of yet?

NoTrubble said:

The raspberry and Lindeman's Cassis (blueberry) I am planning on using in two recipes I am developing called "Framboozle" and "Cascetious".

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Not to nit-pick but Cassis means black currant, not blueberry. It's really hard to get black currants here in the US, though I think Whole foods sells a 100% black currant juice.

Let us know how the fruit cultures turn out. The brewers yeast supplement capsules are probably all dead cells, the Lindemans dregs aren't exactly the kind of wild yeast we're talking about on this thread, culturing from commercial bottles has been covered in a lot of other threads.

Also, hating to burst any bubbles but the Lindeman's fruit lambics are all pasteurized and back sweetened. (Yes, I know that the Oude Kriek isn't, but you can't get it here in the states.) The point being that the Lindeman's Cassis and framboise are pasteurized and thus there is nothing alive in the bottles for you to harvest.

Not to nit-pick but Cassis means black currant, not blueberry. It's really hard to get black currants here in the US, though I think Whole foods sells a 100% black currant juice.

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Understand. Thanks.

The brewers yeast supplement capsules are probably all dead cells...

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They are fermenting a 1.060 wort at the moment. Nice trub cake at the bottom.

The point being that the Lindeman's Cassis and framboise are pasteurized and thus there is nothing alive in the bottles for you to harvest.

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Thanks for letting me know before I spent time on this one. I will have to tell whatever is in the jar fermenting that wort to knock that crap off and quit trying to be real yeast.


The fruit cultures are all coming along nicely now. I got some more time on them but I am looking forward to testing some minibrews with them.

So i've read up to page 33 of this thread and havent found what I'm looking for. So i"m just going to ask. Is there a problem with collecting wild yeast and bacteria at too cold of a temp? I talked to a rep at morebeer a while back and he said that some European brewery he went to only brewed when it was cooler to collect their yeast. So today i brewed a small .5gal batch to leave out for about 12hrs. Then i read on this thread that most people are collecting at around 50-60 degrees. Our temps here right now are between 10-30. I guess one persons idea of cool is different than anothers. Is this going to be a problem? Not that I can do anything about it now. Thanks

I don't have any solid evidence to definitively answer your question, but I've been able to capture yeast as low as 35-40 F. I haven't tried anything lower.
Let us know how things turn out.

turboninja64 said:

So i've read up to page 33 of this thread and havent found what I'm looking for. So i"m just going to ask. Is there a problem with collecting wild yeast and bacteria at too cold of a temp? I talked to a rep at morebeer a while back and he said that some European brewery he went to only brewed when it was cooler to collect their yeast. So today i brewed a small .5gal batch to leave out for about 12hrs. Then i read on this thread that most people are collecting at around 50-60 degrees. Our temps here right now are between 10-30. I guess one persons idea of cool is different than anothers. Is this going to be a problem? Not that I can do anything about it now. Thanks

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The One time I have captured wild yeast was this last December 15th. I left hopped starter wort outside for 12 hours overnight (8-8). That night our low was 41, which was about the temperature of the wort when I got it inside. I funnelled into a growler, shook vigorousl and attached an airlock. I had full krausen a touch more than 24 hours later, my first batch with it got brewed and pitched on new years eve. That Batch had full krausen within 2 hours from pitching and was blowing off 2 hours after that. (3 gallon batch).

Cool. Did you taste the product at all?

My results from the mason jars were that the two smaller ones became contaminated so I threw them out. The raspberry, blueberry and cherry showed weak signs of yeast production. The raisins seemed to outperform the 3 others.

So I harvested and washed it last night for a minimash all grain starter. I am putting together a smallish 2-3 gallon recipe to test it out and I will report back on my findings.

I brewed up a 3 gallon 100% wheat beer for this today and pitched the raisin yeast a couple hours ago. It has already developed a small kruasen top and is very active.

I'm looking forward to the results in a few days.

What's a "minimash allgrain starter"? Did you just mash a handful of grain? Is it hopped?

Yeah basically a handful of grains and a half gallon of water just like I would while doing a regular AG brew day.

No hops used in the starter. Hops are $4 plus per oz at my LHBS and while I believe in supporting them I don't like being extorted. Which is also the same reason I am using wild yeast for this brew test.

If I find contamination then I will use some lemon concentrate if I need to make it more acidic in the future. I am quite surprised how well these beauties are tearing up the wort in the primary.

Cool! Nice info - I think I'll try this experiment in spring or summer

The minimash sounds like quite a good idea, and cheaper than extract, which is what I used last time I tried this, a long time ago.

Anyway, I've been planning to brew a Saison soon since it's Summer here in Oz, and the idea struck me that I could do two batches, one with a Wyeast Saison yeast, and one with some wild yeast, as a lot of people seem to like their wild Saisons. A few hours ago I distributed four small jars of leftover pale ale mash wort (dripped from my mash bag) on the four corners of the property, each with a pinch of acid blend. I'll post back about it.

Pith said:

Cool. Did you taste the product at all?

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I didn't taste either of the starters. The 3 gallon batch is just over 1 week old now. I think I am going to let it sit in primary for 2 or 3 more weeks. This should let me know if a.) I have really hit terminal gravity (I was @ 1.016 when I tasted it), b.) I have something else like Lacto/ Pedio, or Brett in there. and c.) give the yeast a chance to floc a bit more. I tasted it 2 days ago (crazy young) and it tasted really very clean and mild. Not much in the ester departement. No sourness, no off-flavors. my base beer was basically this:

O.G. 1.064
50% Pils
45% white wheat malt
5% caramunich

16 IBU of Hallertau, bittering only.

The whole Idea was to give it just enough body and bitterness that I would taste mostly the yeast and not alot else.

Interesting. If you wanted to get a good feel for the lambic-ness of it, I'd actually do a lambic wort (minus aged hops) with unmalted wheat instead of malted, as that's what the bacteria munches on. And I haven't known Brett to show itself that early.

But yeah, sounds quite successful and interesting. Let us know of course.