How to ferment when you have no yeast?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

tr08

Active Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2017
Messages
34
Reaction score
7
Suppose you live in a very very remote area and there's no homebrew store nearby. How do you get your wort fermented with such condition?

This might be a silly question but I still wanna know.
 
theres the brave souls who do the open wild fermentations there is some bad things that can happen there though. if you can make it to about any grocery store you can pick up a packet of bread yeast.
 
Buy over the internet.

If there is really no way you can get yeast then you could leave the top of, you will get wild yeast "infecting" your beer, this is how lambic is made I suggest you look it up. Bit of a lottery on how it will taste but you should get fermentation and thus alcohol. I'm sure you will find a much more sensible suggestion from someone else though but if you have a bit of an experimental nature this could be down your alley.

Good Luck
:)
 
A little yeast goes a long way, meaning if you can even get a tiny amount of yeast, let's say one packet's worth, or a "slug" of yeast from a brewery (or bakery even,) or even the yeast from bottle conditioned unfiltered beer, then you grow and harvest. For example if you have one pack of beer yeast, you brew a batch of beer, then you read some of the threads on here about yeast washing and harvesting, and you take that yeast and you put it in jars, or sealed beer bottles, and store it way.
Then when you go to make another batch, you take one of those jars and you make a starter with that one jar to grow it big enough to ferment with, then you harvest and store that.

Same with a slug of yeast from a brewery/winery, or bottle conditioned beers, you drink the beer, but leave the yeast at the bottom of the bottle, then you sanitize the lip of the bottle and pour the yeast into starter wort, and you grow that until it's big enough to ferment a batch of beer, and then you harvest that yeast.

You can also play around with wild yeast, even taking some of the commercial beer yeast and exposing it to the wild yeasts in nature, such as on fruit skins, and try to grow a unique strain.... with wild yeast there will be a lot more misses than hits but it can be done.

Or you find a Bakery and get some of their yeast.... Back in the 17th and 18th centuries the brewhouse and the bakery were tied into each in a town, and they shared yeast- there really weren't different brewing and baking strains, it was all the same initially, then with repeated uses the same Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast started to mutate towards more specialized strains.

This guy has quite a few videos discussion baking/brewing in Colonial America that might give you ideas.

You could brew a batch of beer with bread yeast.. and that one might not taste all that good.. BUT if you take that yeast at the bottom of the fermenter after it's done, and brew a batch with that, then that yeast is now more conditioned to make beer with the sugars present in wort as opposed to in flour, and as they reproduce you've mutated them using that same yeast 2-3 more times, and you've made your own beer yeast.

Remember fermentation has been done since prehistoric times, long before there were homebrewshops, and specialized yeast, people were turning sugar into alcohol. And sometimes if you live in remote areas you might have to kind of revert to historical measures in the beginning.

Even on here there are tons of threads and articles about how different cultured brewed through history, how they handled lack of yeast (look up the Viking's "Magic Yeast Sticks" for example.) And you might have to experiment and adapt it to your situation.

Your profile says you are in Thailand, are you close to Bangkok? I would look into hooking up with http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/26/foodanddrink/illegal-homebrewed-beers-thailand/ maybe find out where they're getting their yeast... maybe they'd share a few slugs of it with you...

Did you check out google? Looks like there's actually a forum called homebrewthailand.....


They actually list 4 different brewshops in Thailand.

All you need is a little bit to start and a little ingenuity.
 
I experimented with capturing a wild yeast. The first was to put a small jar of wort on a window sill. After a week or so, it smelled terrible so I dumped it. The second I put a rose blossom in wort for a day, took it out and it fermented. It smelled good and didn't taste bad so I did a small batch. It was extremely fruity but drinkable.

I will try this again in the future.
 
Back
Top