Dream come true

I work for a small university's biology department. Yesterday I got the green light from one of the micro geek profs to use her lab at my leisure over the summer. This lab contains two type 2 flow hoods, an autoclave and all the other toys necessary for sterile culture. I think thats worth two...

Task one will be teasing apart the Jolly Pumpkin community (Dexter has got some tasty little beasties!!)

Just looking for some ideas; FIRE AWAY

TheCrane said:

I work for a small university's biology department. Yesterday I got the green light from one of the micro geek profs to use her lab ...
Just looking for some ideas; FIRE AWAY

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Maybe don't call her a micro-geek?

I grow a lot of my yeast in my lab, be careful autoclaving DME in water, it boils over and makes a sticky mess. Don't use YPD to grow beer yeast. It takes a long time to re-suspend yeast pellets after spinning them at 1,000rpm for 20 minutes. Thats all I can think of now...

ColoradoXJ13 said:

Maybe don't call her a micro-geek?

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As a self-proclaimed bug-geek, this is a term of endearment. Geesh!!

ColoradoXJ13 said:

Don't use YPD to grow beer yeast.

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Thanks for the input. What do you recommend as a medium? I plan on going after Saccharomyces and brett.

To help prevent boilovers, put the flask with your DME media in a tray of water in the autoclave. Also, don't put your stir bar in there before autoclaving. I found that really makes boilover issues much worse. I had figured, why not, that's one less step to worry about contamination. Once I stop autocalving the stir bar in situ, boilovers were less common. I store my stir bars in empty White lab vials filled with 70% isopropanol. I just drain the alcohol off into another tube and then dump the bar into the flask

TheCrane said:

Thanks for the input. What do you recommend as a medium? I plan on going after Saccharomyces and brett.

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1g DME to 10mL H2O and some yeast nutrient (I use yeast extract which I believe is the same thing you buy from the LHBS)

pjj2ba said:

Once I stop autocalving the stir bar in situ, boilovers were less common.

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Weird. Thanks for the heads up. Do either of you have experience with isolating pure strains?. I'd like to take some commercially produced, open and/or spontaneously fermented beers and isolate the various microbes present in the lees. Could you point me to some good resources on the subject? I do have some experience with inoculating plates and other sterile techniques. I am mainly interested in suggestions specific to identifying, isolating, and culturing various beer beasts.

TheCrane said:

Weird. Thanks for the heads up. Do either of you have experience with isolating pure strains?. I'd like to take some commercially produced, open and/or spontaneously fermented beers and isolate the various microbes present in the lees. Could you point me to some good resources on the subject? I do have some experience with inoculating plates and other sterile techniques. I am mainly interested in suggestions specific to identifying, isolating, and culturing various beer beasts.

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When isolating strains, I usually take a bottle conditioned beer, pour off the beer, then swirl the bottle to suspend the sediment, then pour it into media and grow it. I did once plate the stuff on a YPD plate and pick a single colony, but I think this was a mistake. As much as many strains are "pure", in the case of this Witbier strain, I think it was a mix, and by only picking a single colony, I missed the other strain...