Yeast Today, Beer Tomorrow: a yeast quest.

[Novims]

Never give up on yeast.
I brewed a Best Bitter back in early december, a take on Miraculix Best, hoping to, once and for all, brew a perfect english pint, which I never succeeded to. Brew day went well until I opened the fridge to fetch the yeast. The only english yeast I had laid in two 500 ml Mason jars of WLP 002 harvested...back in may. Two 500 ml (with beer on top) of it. Not too bad you would say. Except for the color.
It was not tan. Not gray.
It was black.
A black and nasty layer was floating atop the creamy stuff . Was it dead yeast? Mold? I did not now. I was hesitant, but I had no choice: my only other option was a fresh pack of US-05 and I didn't want to ruin 5,5 gallons of a beautiful english beer by drying it up with an american yeast.
So I pitched it. I decanted the liquid then poured the black, disgusting, gooey content of those two jars in the carboy. Then I oxygenated with a degassing wand.
And waited. Anxiously.
The yeast took forever to take off: 60h of lag time.I racked on day 12 and tasted it...
Best english beer I ever brewed.
I love 002 in hoppy beers but I always get intense flowery tones from it in delicate ones like bitters, a distracting taste that tends to dissapear after a while. Not this this time. The beer is wonderfully "english", the mouthfeel is great for a 4,2% beer, subtle esters playing with the malt and hops.
Of course, I would never recommend doing what I did to anyone. Always use fresh yeast. Don't trust black moldy stuff.
But... this proves (well, not really, it's only anecdotal) that yeast is resilient and that good handling (of yeast) is just one step in getting good beer.
Conclusion: never give up on yeast.

 

[BrewerBrad82]

Black moldy stuff = good handling? I am confused.

 

[Novims]

What I did was not good handling. But it produced good beer. Therefore, good handling is just one of the things that contributes to good beer, but it's not mandatory.
Or perhaps, I've just been lucky.

 

[Toto's]

Now it would be interesting if you could brew again the same beer and use a new fresh yeast from the store and taste and compare the 2 batches.

 

[Novims]

I'll surely do. The beer is great.
I don't think I would do a side by side though, brewing 5 gal with fresh clean yeast and 5 gal with old nasty yeast. I don't want to have to to grow this...thing again. It actually looked like a Kombucha Scoby.

 

[BrewZer]

I'd just call it "cajun trub" and call it a day, especially since your batch came out great.

 

[Birrofilo]

Maybe the black colour was due to oxydization. The "mold" could have been, as you say, a scoby which contributed some lactofermentation aromas to your beer. A bit like adding some Lactobacillus plantarum to a Berliner Weisse, but with many more kinds of different bacteria rather than just one. Hops inhibits the proliferation of this microbe (and possibly others in your starter) but the acids which were produced in the starter might have given an aromatic "twist" to your ale. Besides, some little proliferation of the scoby coltures might have happened in your wort.

 

[McKnuckle]

Congrats on your good luck! I could drive blindfolded down my street and possibly not hit anything. But if that happened, it certainly wouldn't prove that it was safe to keep doing it.

 

[Birrofilo]

I have a general musing to do on this: in modern "technological" production of fermented food it is normal to use only one strain of one microbe: be it bread, or beer, or wine, technology tought us to inoculate the food with a single strain in order to avoid surprises and to have repeatable and foreseeable results.

Yet, our forefathers did not have this kind of technology. Every fermented food always had the contribution of more than one microbe, and more than one strain of the same microbe. Just like we can have a complex population in home-made Sauercraut or salame, so the previous generations of homebrewers might have easily had complex populations in their beers and wines. That might have led occasionally to some bad batch, which also caused the destruction of the vat. But if the production was good, the wood which was employed (the maturing casks) would be "infected" with the right complex population and would inoculate the subsequent production batches, because our ancestors did not sanitize most of their instruments: they just burned those which produced a bad batch, and re-used those which produced a good batch.

If you had used a wood fermenter, your next batches would probably have the same delicious aromatic profiles.

The great complexity of aromas in certain DOP products, Protected Denomination of Origin, is also due to the rigid observance of traditional producing techniques which preserve a complexity which cannot be reproduced by just pitching one or two strains of a known microbe. Cheeses, hams, salame and other cured meats, certain DOP vinegars, wines such as Marsala, Port, Madeira, Sherry, certain Jamaican Rums all benefit from this attention to using old wood with good and complex spontaneous inoculation.

I don't know if other countries have a proverb which says: botte vecchia dà vino buono, "old vat gives good wine". This is actually a bit incorrect: a vat could become "old" because it gave good wine. Vats which did not give good wine were immediately burned. It's Darwinism applied to wood ageing ;-)

 

[Novims]

I like the idea of the old days cross-contamination-that-gives-complexity fermentation, but I can't be that lucky forever. I don't think I'll burn the carboy, but I'll certainly bleach it to avoid surprises with future batches.
Or keep it as is for sours.

 

[Murrayatuptown]

Darwinism applied ;-)

Ciao!

Visited a friend in the Biella region some years ago. He took us to some touristy towns and we bought some wrapped biscuit/pastries called '...Morbidi'. attempting cognate language skills, I asked 'dead?' He replied, no, soft.

Brought them home and several months later noticed no 'best by' or expiry date. I emailed him to ask how long they keep. His response: I guess until somebody gets sick...

They looked and tasted fine. Somehow that pannetone my wife buys now around Christmas never molds either.

Ancient wisdom has defeated Darwinism...