Folks who like catching wild yeasts, do you find tons of active bacteria fermentations instead of yeast?

[Culinarytracker]

I've been playing around with building a yeast lab, and collected 12 samples from my yard and dropped them into a test tube of plain 1.020 wort. Some started fermenting within a couple days, other started vigorous fermentation within a week or so.

However, when I started looking at samples under the microscope, none of them had any yeast cells, just tiny hair like bacteria, and maybe some stuff like a pediococcus.

Do wild fermentation enthusiasts mess with this stuff too, or should I try to exclude all that and focus on yeast?

I just streaked some agar plates with the active samples last night too, so we'll see.

 

[pursuit0fhoppiness]

How did you collect the samples? I'm wondering if you didn't actually capture any yeast, but contaminated your samples with bacteria in some way. Interested to see what you get on your streaked plates as I used to work in a hospital micro lab.

 

[Culinarytracker]

I pressure cooked 12 35mL test tubes with ~20mL of 1.020 wort in them. Then I took small clippings of various things around the yard and stuffed it into the wort. A few dandelion flowers, some pine needles, juniper sprigs, etc...