Kloeckera apiculata by itself?

I'm sure all/most of you have seen the little list regarding wild yeasts in left out wort that has been copypasted a billion times, but I'll post it here again just in case, to help illustrate my point.

(3 to 7 days) Enteric Bacteria and Kloeckera Apiculata
(2 weeks) Saccharomyces
(3 to 4 months) Lactic Acid Bacteria
(8 months) Brettanomyces plus Pichia, Candida, Hansenula and Cryptococcus

The wild cultures I built from fruit skin that I have used to ferment wheat malt extract wort have lacked any discernible character, possibly due to there being a hundred different strains of Saccharomyces, none of which had the chance to assert their character over the other strains and instead produced a plethora of separate esters in undetectable amounts.

Now. Slide 13 of this tells me that K. apiculata give fruiting, floral and citrus notes to beer, and this tells me that the enteric bacteria and the K. apiculata ferment all the glucose in the wort into ethanol and CO2, leaving all the more complex sugars (ie maltose) for the wild Saccharomyces strains to come in and eat. The K. apiculata also break down proteins into smaller amino acids. The Saccharomyces period in the familiar table I copypasted up there is so long (ie between 2 weeks and 3/4 months)because of the "lack of glucose to get the Saccharomyces started and factors secreted by various early players that inhibit its growth", according to the last link I posted.

So, that tells us that K. apiculata would be useless as the sole fermenter for the vast majority of beers, even if you do some obscure German low-temp mash rest I once read about that produces a lot of glucose in the wort. If it's possible to use that rest to make ONLY glucose and only a very small fraction of more complex sugars, I think it sounds like a plan. But for the purposes of this first post, we'll assume you can't.

Now, the following rests on a common-sense based (read: non-scientific) assumption that if K. apiculata can eat glucose (which is a monosaccharide, ie simple sugar) but not maltose (which is a disaccharide), it may well be able to eat fructose/levulose, which is also a monosaccharide/simple sugar. Honey is, on average, 17 percent water, 31 percent dextrose/glucose, and 38 percent fructose, which leaves only 14 left, accounting for maltose/complex sugars/compounds (only 1.4 percent of a 1:10 must). The final beverage would be "fruiting, floral and citrus[y]", if we are to believe the .

How to proceed:

Make a malt extract wort starter with gauze over the top, and leave it out for maybe 6 days for all the glucose to be fermented by bacteria and K. apiculata. Bring it in, build up the starter using ONLY dextrose/corn sugar OR honey, and some nutrients.

Anything I'm missing? Has anyone tried something similar before? Is that powerpoint slide about K. apiculata character just plain "wrong"?

You would have to isolate the Kloeckera from the starter. Otherwise you will grow up the kloeckera along with everything else able to continue consuming glucose under the given conditions. As ethanol rises and pH lowers, some bacteria will drop out but everything that can survive in those conditions or future conditions will still be in the culture. So if you kept feeding it glucose and eventually dumped it a mead must you will eventually start getting fermentation from other critters.

ReverseApacheMaster said:

You would have to isolate the Kloeckera from the starter. Otherwise you will grow up the kloeckera along with everything else able to continue consuming glucose under the given conditions. As ethanol rises and pH lowers, some bacteria will drop out but everything that can survive in those conditions or future conditions will still be in the culture. So if you kept feeding it glucose and eventually dumped it a mead must you will eventually start getting fermentation from other critters.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I don't have agar plates and such to do isolating. But I figure that if I continue to provide the conditions more favourable for K. apiculata, eventually they will dominate, right? The above source seems to indicate that the K is a quick fermenter who will quickly eat the simple sugars and then fall out of solution, right? So if I rack off the cake at 90 percent attenuation or something and discard the must along with the Sacch that are getting ready to ferment the remaining 10 percent, and then repeat this process n amount of times, eventually I will have a culture of yeasts that quickly ferment single sugars, ie a K. apiculata majority. Does that seem sound?

K. apiculata has a low ethanohol tolerance. This can be improved, according to what I've read, by lowering fermentation temperature to ~10C. I cannot give you numbers from experience, but it would appear that in mixed cultures, after about 10 days at 25C, K. apiculata populations decline below detectable levels, whereas at 10C, they survive in the 10^7 to 10^8 calls/ml range to 30 days. This is about the same level as S. cervesiae.

It seems that K. apiculata produces acetic acid and ethyl acetate in higher concentrations than S. cervesiae. Selecting for a "pure" K. apiculata fermentation of glucose and simple sugars may not produce a desirable result. In mixed cultures, the production of acetic acid is in between that of single cultures of K. apiculata and S. cervesiae.

I think it is questionable how much character the K. apiculata lends to a beer that is fermented 2 or more years, with the last 16 months dominated by slow Brettanomyces fermentation. If you are able to increase K. apiculata fermentation early, you may wish to experiment with early bottling (at about 1 year) and or blending.

Let us know how your experiments go.

Hmm, yes, K. apiculata's ethanol tolerance appears to only be 9% and increasing to 10-12.5% at 15C, according to the abstracts of papers I found after a quick googling. Also, I don't think I'm interested in vinegar and solvent flavours. Damn.

I understand K. apiculata would not lead to much character in spontaneously fermented beers of a long age. I was mainly hooked on this idea since K. apiculata is a) a wild yeast, b) one that is very quick to be found, and c) one that claims have been made about regarding its pleasantness of character.

Maybe I'll give it a miss after all.