Fungus instead of yeast as fermenter

[neesan]

Hi everyone!

I'm new to this forum and I am particularly fond of the world of mycology, specifically of a certain medicinal mushroom. I recently discovered this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11515544

I need everyone's opinion on this matter. Can you make, say rice wine but instead of spreading yeast on the rice, you spread solid culture of mycelium evenly on the rice and wait until it forms wine? Would doing so just make the fungus spread into the rice and colonizing it, making it an even bigger solid culture or will it produce wine through alcohol dehydrogenase as the article said?


Thank you very much

 

[BrewZer]

I have a rule to never put mushrooms in my beer, so maybe I'm not the best person to ask about this.

 

[beerlover77]

I am assuming there was some sort of yeast present on the mushrooms that made the wine. Yeast eats sugar and Alcohol is a by-product. I don't think the fungus itself does this

 

[beermanpete]

I believe the yeast balls used for traditional rice wine contain a combination of yeast and fungus. The fungus breakdown the starch into fermentable sugars that the yeast then ferment into alcohol. I suspect that if an isolated culture of mycelium is used there will nothing to ferment the sugars into alcohol.

 

[chickypad]

Yeasts are fungi, along with mushrooms and mold. Never heard of it before but looking at that abstract it doesn't sound like all mushrooms produce alcohol dehydrogenase, you'd probably have to check the species. I wondering how gag-worthy the wines in that paper were.

 

[neesan]

Yeasts are fungi, along with mushrooms and mold. Never heard of it before but looking at that abstract it doesn't sound like all mushrooms produce alcohol dehydrogenase, you'd probably have to check the species. I wondering how gag-worthy the wines in that paper were.

Aaaaa... Good thing that you noticed. I'm aware that based on the paper, not all mushrooms can produce alcohol but I'm willing to experiment. Sadly the paper doesn't provide much details aside from abstraction, but I assume that they didn't use yeast since there said "made wine by using a mushroom in place of S. cereviseae". The only thing that I'm concerned about is the technical execution. How did they trigger mushrooms to form alcohol?

In the world of mycology there is a step called "liquid culture". Where a liquid consisting of water, starch or sugar is inoculated with mono-culture of mycelium to let it grow in the liquid. Maybe they just inoculated a sugary solution and when the mushroom grows, they strain the mycelium bits and retain the liquid as wine (?)

If so, one of the most common liquid culture mix is based on honey. So maybe a mushroom based mead(?)

 

[chickypad]

My stomach is rolling at the thought
But in the name of science, you should try it!!

 

[shetc]

 

[Amadeo38]

If the problem is that you need access to the methods section for technical details, I’ll log in tomorrow and report back. I’m mildly interested in seeing this attempted with beer. I’m guessing that from the abstract, it’s a very specific species of mushroom you’ll need to find online and use.

 

[Amadeo38]

If the problem is that you need access to the methods section for technical details, I’ll log in tomorrow and report back. I’m mildly interested in seeing this attempted with beer. I’m guessing that from the abstract, it’s a very specific species of mushroom you’ll need to find online and use.

 

[neesan]

I believe the yeast balls used for traditional rice wine contain a combination of yeast and fungus. The fungus breakdown the starch into fermentable sugars that the yeast then ferment into alcohol. I suspect that if an isolated culture of mycelium is used there will nothing to ferment the sugars into alcohol.

I'm interested with what you said. I heard that part of rice wine making process is inoculating rice with A. oryzae to form koji, a mass of rice fermented by A. oryzae fungus. I assume that's also the case with nuruk (Korean starter) as well.

I can find a practical application in making rice wine from excess of my fungus growing endeavor. The substrate in which I grow the mushroom from is made of grains. After the grains are fully colonized and fermented and mushrooms finishED growing on top of it, I harvest the mushroomS and separate the "grain cakes". Then I dry the grain cakes and after finished, I cook them again as if I'm cooking rice and then I inoculate them with S. cereviseae. Heat processing when cooking rice=medicinal compounds extracted, alcohol formation from yeast fermentation=more medicinal compounds extracted to the rice wine.

In summary, my process here would be= Raw grains>>Hydration through cooking>>Inoculation and fermentation by mushroom>>Dehydration>>Hydration through cooking>>Inoculation and fermentation by yeast. DOUBLE FERMENTATION RICE WINE MAKING.

My question would be= Does the process of making rice wine use koji as the main material or is it regular rice amended with koji?

Anyway heres a pic of my “mushroom koji”:

I believe the yeast balls used for traditional rice wine contain a combination of yeast and fungus. The fungus breakdown the starch into fermentable sugars that the yeast then ferment into alcohol. I suspect that if an isolated culture of mycelium is used there will nothing to ferment the sugars into alcohol.

 

[beermanpete]

My question would be= Does the process of making rice wine use koji as the main material or is it regular rice amended with koji?

Anyway heres a pic of my “mushroom koji”:
View attachment 562553

First off, I don't know a lot about this. Most of what I know came from a post here on Homebrew Talk: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...nal-rice-wine-cheap-fun-and-different.361095/. When I first saw this post and decided to try it I did my usual internet research to get a better idea of what is going on but that scarcely makes me an expert. Wikipedia can only do so much .

The "wine" I made, following the process presented in the post linked above is standard white rice that is cooked in the usual manner and cooled. Then the yeast balls are crumbled and mixed into the rice. The result, after about one month, is fermented rice with a fair volume of liquid separated from it that is the "wine". It seems that the rice and the liquor are used for various food preparation as well as drinking the liquor separately.

The yeast balls apparently contain koji along with other organisms that (seem to) work independently to break down the starch into sugars and then into alcohol.

 

[neesan]

First off, I don't know a lot about this. Most of what I know came from a post here on Homebrew Talk: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...nal-rice-wine-cheap-fun-and-different.361095/. When I first saw this post and decided to try it I did my usual internet research to get a better idea of what is going on but that scarcely makes me an expert. Wikipedia can only do so much .

No problem.

Btw I just checked your link, seems to be an easy and straightforward thing to do.

The thing is the part when you said that the fungus could ferment the rice to make fermentable sugar, it just makes sense for me to use the fermented grains from my mushroom growing and just add regular brewing yeast to make decent tasted rice wine (since the mushroom already converted starches into sugar anyway).

 

[Amadeo38]

Here are the methods from the paper:

Cultivation of mushrooms and preparation of the
cell-free extract. Agaricus blazei MWU-C20, Flammulina
velutipes MWU-C3 and Pleurotus ostreatus
MWU-C1 were used in this experiment (Fig. 1).
These mushrooms were purchased at a local market
at Nishinomiya in Japan. Their cultures were obtained
by aseptically inoculating the tissue from the
fruiting bodies into a medium containing 2% malt
extract (pH 5.6). Mushroom cultures that had been
grown on an incline were inoculated into 200 ml of
the medium in a 500-ml Erlenmyer flask. Cultivation
was carried out at 25°C for 2 weeks under aerobic
conditions with a rotary shaker (100 r.p.m.). Mycelia
were collected by centrifugation at 10,000 x g for
10 min and washed twice with an ice-cold saline solution.
The mycelial pellet was suspended in a 10 mM
Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7 .5) and subjected to sonication
with an ultrasonic oscillator (Branson, Sonifier 250,
20 kHz) for 16 min at below 8°C. The undestroyed
mycelia and debris were discarded after centrifuging
at 10,000 x g for 10 min. The supernatant solution
obtained was used as the cell-free extract.

 

[neesan]

Here are the methods from the paper:

Cultivation of mushrooms and preparation of the
cell-free extract. Agaricus blazei MWU-C20, Flammulina
velutipes MWU-C3 and Pleurotus ostreatus
MWU-C1 were used in this experiment (Fig. 1).
These mushrooms were purchased at a local market
at Nishinomiya in Japan. Their cultures were obtained
by aseptically inoculating the tissue from the
fruiting bodies into a medium containing 2% malt
extract (pH 5.6). Mushroom cultures that had been
grown on an incline were inoculated into 200 ml of
the medium in a 500-ml Erlenmyer flask. Cultivation
was carried out at 25°C for 2 weeks under aerobic
conditions with a rotary shaker (100 r.p.m.). Mycelia
were collected by centrifugation at 10,000 x g for
10 min and washed twice with an ice-cold saline solution.
The mycelial pellet was suspended in a 10 mM
Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7 .5) and subjected to sonication
with an ultrasonic oscillator (Branson, Sonifier 250,
20 kHz) for 16 min at below 8°C. The undestroyed
mycelia and debris were discarded after centrifuging
at 10,000 x g for 10 min. The supernatant solution
obtained was used as the cell-free extract.

Wow! I owe you man!

It vaguely seems like my guess were right, develop the mycelium in liquid, let the fungus do the job, then strain the debris and retain the liquid as alcohol. Although I completely don't understand the sonication part, so I might be wrong here. I still think that mead (with lowest honey to water concentration as possible) is the best for practical application.

 

[triethylborane]

Wow! I owe you man!

It vaguely seems like my guess were right, develop the mycelium in liquid, let the fungus do the job, then strain the debris and retain the liquid as alcohol. Although I completely don't understand the sonication part, so I might be wrong here. I still think that mead (with lowest honey to water concentration as possible) is the best for practical application.

Looks like sonication, application of a mechanical wave, was used to disrupt cell membranes of the hyphae/mycelia to release the internal biological molecules for further processing. 20kHz would be at the low threshold of ultrasonic waves.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I heard that part of rice wine making process is inoculating rice with A. oryzae to form koji, a mass of rice fermented by A. oryzae fungus. I assume that's also the case with nuruk (Korean starter) as well.

Some of this may just be a question of terminology. I know it can have a more general interpretation but in the brewing world, "fermenting" refers specifically to sugar -> ethanol. So what the Aspergillus oryzae is doing is not fermentation in the brewing sense, all it is doing is providing amylase enzymes to convert rice starch to free sugar, the equivalent of what barley enzymes do to barley starch during mashing of a barley beer. Then once the starch has been converted, there's a separate process in which Saccharomyces takes over and converts the sugar into ethanol.

Pubmed doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment but it seems you're referring to
Characteristics of wine produced by mushroom fermentation by T Okamura (2001). It looks like they tested a bunch of fungi to see which ones could do the Aspergillus step and the Saccharomyces step, and some of them worked, with the "best" result coming from matsutake at 4.6%.

My observations would be - a lot of fungi rely on secreting enzymes, including amylases, to "eat" wood etc - it's a typical way of life for most "toadstools". Ethanol is a poison to fungi, so many make small amounts of ADH to detoxify that poison. So the basic biochemistry is common to a lot of fungi - the challenge is finding "weird" fungi that have enough of those enzymes to make meaningful amounts of sugar and then ethanol, and don't get poisoned in the process.

It's not easy - it's taken centuries of domestication to evolve Saccharomyces with decent alcohol production and alcohol tolerance - and, crucially, that don't produce too many bad-tasting off-flavours at the same time. So my guess is that after some experimentation you may end up with some liquid that's 2-3% ethanol, but full of pretty horrible tasting phenols and thiols etc.

And of course the ever-present risk of a really nasty fungal toxin just to spice things up...

 

[BenniferBropez]

I just discovered this thread after finding the paler online. I have attached it here. I am curious if anyone has tried this since the time of the original post. It looks pretty involved.

Ben