Club Project - Wild Culture Capturing

[snowveil]

At our small club's meeting in February I asked for idea suggestions for future projects and someone threw out trying to collect wild yeast. After a little research (and inspiration from John Wilson and Brian Wolfe's Brewing Wild seminar at Homebrewcon '16), we decided to go for it.

We pressure cooked 24 quart size mason jars with 1.035, 4.2pH wort and handed them out to various members of the club at the May meeting. I typed up a small document with suggestions on how to culture, borrowing information from Milk The Funk, Bootleg Biology, and Jester King's blog.

Some members chucked flowers into the jars, some left theirs out to collect yeast and bacteria from the air while covered with cheesecloth.

Collecting flowers during a bike ride on a gorgeous Spring day

The first two inoculations: Redbud flowers and Honeysuckle

I chose to inoculate the jars with flowers. Redbud, Honeysuckle, Dogwood, Lilac, and Cherry Blossoms


The plan was to hand these inoculated jars out 2 weeks before Big Brew Day, for which we already had an event planned anyway. We'd bring the jars to the event, then evaluate for aroma and pH drop to see which jars were worth stepping up. More details in the next post...

 

[snowveil]

So big brew day has come and gone. We collected a few takeaways from the wild yeast collection.

1) Add some hops to the wort to roughly 20IBU. This will inhibit bacteria growth
2) Even though you're not planning on drinking the starter jars, still give them a full boil (since we made an all-grain starter) to drive off DMS. Our starter jars were pretty heavy on DMS smell because they were barely boiled. This will help to more easily identify which aromas are coming from wild fermentation and which were left over from the lack of a boil.
3) The jars that were inoculated with flowers, then had them strained out after ~24 hours seemed to fair the best. Any exposed areas above the surface of the wort just collected a ton of mold.

The aromas coming from these jars were pretty interesting. Anything with mold had a typical "musty" smell to it. Some of the moldy cultures actually didn't smell too bad, but because we don't have any immediate plans to clean these cultures up with Agar plates we're not taking a chance. Aromas ranged from cooked corn, to perfume, to maple syrup, to honey.

For big brew day I brewed up a very simple 10 gallon base beer:

100% Avangard Pilsen
10 IBU Magnum at 60 minutes
10 IBU Spalt Select at 20 minutes
1.043 OG

Any jars that had mold on them (which there were quite a few of) were immediately rejected. Those that didn't were tested for aroma and pH. Because the starter volumes were so small, measuring a drop in gravity would have been too difficult so we relied on a drop in pH. The starter wort control was 4.2pH and the promising jars all landed between 3.2pH and 3.6pH.

We settled down to 7 different cultures and pitched them into one gallon glass jugs.

no...NO...NO!!!! DUMP 'EM!

The jugs, featuring a TON of protein break from the Pils. Don't worry, it settled out just fine.

After less than 12 hours, surprisingly two of the cultures were already cranking away

2 days later, and 3 of the cultures are showing visible signs of fermentation. The others appear to have some positive pressure in the airlock (s-bubbler style) but nothing visibly going on.

I'll keep updating as we go! The plan is to hopefully get one good culture out of all of these to step up and hand out to members of the club so they can do whatever they please with it.

 

[snowveil]

-- saved for updates 2 --

 

[snowveil]

--- saved for updates ....3? ---

 

[TandemTails]

That's awesome! I'm really curious how these turn out. Looking forward to the future updates.

 

[Weezy]

Fun stuff. I hope you guys find some good strains.

 

[Dcpcooks]

Check out bootleg biologies web site. They will bank strains for you if you find one you like!

 

[snowveil]

For some reason I can't update the original thread...so here goes:


Evaluation of the Lebanon Wild Yeast capture project!

For those unfamiliar, several members of the club collected flora from various areas around Lebanon County, and added them to approximately 30 pre-acidified starter jars of unfermented wort. We collected everything from Lilacs, Honeysuckle, Dogwood blossoms, Cherry blossoms, air captures...you name it!

On May 6th a few of us evaluated each jar for pH drop, appearance, and aroma. We narrowed the samples down to 7 viable candidates.

We brewed a simple base beer to ferment the collected yeasts in.

100% Avangard Pils
20 IBU Spalter Select at 15 minutes
1.043 Starting Gravity

Each of the seven yeast cultures were pitched into individual one gallon fermenters, and allowed to ferment for just over one month. I've named each yeast "LAFY1" through "LAFY9"

Without further ado, here's the sensory results of each!

LAFY1 -- Lee's Dogwood/Buglewood capture
FG: 1.008 (4.6% abv), 3.45pH
Appearance: Brilliantly clear.
Aroma: Fruity, Peachy. Little to no "spice" character compared to the rest, but still there.
Taste: Slightly tart, slightly tannic. Minimal Peach/Apricot-like fruit character, thin mouthfeel, finishes dry and a little tannic.
Overall: This is my favorite of the batch. This would make a great saison with a little recipe tweaking.

LAFY2 -- Jim B's Deck air capture
FG 1.007 (4.7% abv), 3.89pH
Appearance: Slightly hazy but not milky...can still see through.
Aroma: Spicy, slightly woody.
Taste: Spicy, almost "Witbier-like" character that's somewhat subdued. Silky mouthfeel
Overall: Relatively mild "Belgian" character. Again, very viable strain.

LAFY3 -- Cherry or Apple Blossoms (unsure which member's culture)
FG 1.008 (4.6% abv), 4.03pH
Appearance: Hazy, not murky. Can still see through.
Aroma: Spicy, moreso than LAFY2. More like a Belgian table beer than a Witbier...to contrast it to LAFY2.
Taste: Tannic. Very much like the aroma...like a Patersbier. Very drying in finish, slightly watery as well.
Overall: Probably the spiciest of all of the yeast captures, but not overbearing.

LAFY4 -- Mike V's Rail Trail Honeysuckle Blossoms
FG 1.002 (5.2% abv), 4.11pH
Appearance: Hazy, not murky. Like LAFY2 and LAFY3.
Aroma: Spicy like LAFY3, but has somewhat of a nail polish remover aroma to it.
Taste: Silky mouthfeel. Spicy and slightly woody...possibly earthy. Has minor rubber phenol character in finish.
Overall: Borderline unpleasant tannic and phenolic character overall. Not terrible, but really worth brewing with.

LAFY5 -- Grantville Wild Lilac (unknown LAF member's capture)
FG 1.006 (4.8% abv), 3.75pH
Appearance: Brilliantly clear, just like LAFY1.
Aroma: Pretty clean, but slightly woody/spicy. Picked up some Diacetyl initially but it seems to have dropped out now.
Taste: Somewhat non-descript spice character. Has a sweetness to it. Relatively clean overall, with a minor wood character to it.
Overall: The cleanest yeast of them all.

LAFY6 -- Mike C's Sour Cherry Blossoms
FG 1.013 (4.0% abv), 3.70pH
Appearance: Very hazy, but you can still see through it somewhat. Haziest of them all, but not milky/murky.
Aroma: Honey and floral. Very different from the rest.
Taste: Sweet up front with minor spice and tannic finish. Mouthfeel is somewhat rich until you're hit with the tannins. This is surprisingly very mead-like.
Overall: By far the most "interesting" yeast. I can see this really doing well with a braggot or fruit additions. If you could tone down the tannins in the finish it'd be excellent.

LAFY7 -- Lee's Wild Violets
FG 1.012 (4.1% abv), 4.35 pH
Appearance: In the fermenter this beer has a very distinct stratification line where some yeast rafts are sitting...it's very bizarre. About a centimeter above the rafts, the beer changes color from roughly 5SRM to 15SRM. I'm not sure if this is due to oxidation or something else.
Aroma: Very rubbery, cardboardy...maybe I'm just projecting oxidation on it but it's very unpleasant.
Taste: Again, very, very oxidized and rubbery tasting. I spit this one out just to be safe, in case something bad was in there.
Overall: It's possible I just allowed it to oxidize, but this was by far the least pleasant capture of the 7 that were stepped up from the original 30 jars.

 

[snowveil]