Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a type of fission yeast originally isolated from from an East African millet beer. It is used commonly in a variety of research in biology. Due to my deviant and unhealthy obsession in making beer with strange critters, I am unsurprisingly interested in using this beastie for making beer and have managed to scrounge some. Well, I'm supposed to be getting it next week, at least.
So does anyone on here have any experience with S. pombe? I've only found a couple references online to making beer with this guy and the reviews are mixed, to say the least. One fellow attempted to make beer with pombe and described his results as "foul, the worst sulfur smell I ever had...The resulting brew was uninteresting: very dry, very thin." While these types of reviews are less than confidence installing, they also make me wonder a couple things. First of all, I wonder if these results would actually be unpalatable to someone who was both wanting and expecting funky results. Also, I wonder if it would be possible to minimize some of these unpalatable characteristics by changing some of the fermentation parameters. For example, what if pombe produced cleaner fermentation at higher/lower temperatures? Also, pombe was initially used to make beer from millet and what not rather than from barley and hops. The few things I could find on this millet beer suggested that it was not unpleasant. Could there be something in the barley or hops that the pombe metabolizes into unpalatable compounds that are not present in millet?
Another track to take, I think, would be to try mixing the pombe with another more common type of yeast, like sach or brett. That way most of the fermentation is done by a 'cleaner' yeast while the pombe provides a funky edge.
So much brewing to be done. Heh.
So does anyone on here have any experience with S. pombe? I've only found a couple references online to making beer with this guy and the reviews are mixed, to say the least. One fellow attempted to make beer with pombe and described his results as "foul, the worst sulfur smell I ever had...The resulting brew was uninteresting: very dry, very thin." While these types of reviews are less than confidence installing, they also make me wonder a couple things. First of all, I wonder if these results would actually be unpalatable to someone who was both wanting and expecting funky results. Also, I wonder if it would be possible to minimize some of these unpalatable characteristics by changing some of the fermentation parameters. For example, what if pombe produced cleaner fermentation at higher/lower temperatures? Also, pombe was initially used to make beer from millet and what not rather than from barley and hops. The few things I could find on this millet beer suggested that it was not unpleasant. Could there be something in the barley or hops that the pombe metabolizes into unpalatable compounds that are not present in millet?
Another track to take, I think, would be to try mixing the pombe with another more common type of yeast, like sach or brett. That way most of the fermentation is done by a 'cleaner' yeast while the pombe provides a funky edge.
So much brewing to be done. Heh.
