Rare yeast, and I'm getting ahold of some!

Some of you may have heard of Lars Marius Garshol, Norwrgian guy who has been doing in depth studies of farmhouse ales here and in Lithuania. If I'm not mistaken he had a hand in getting the Norwegian Farmhouse Ale strain produced at white labs.

That isn't the only farmhouse strain here, as it turns out there's lots of little farms around the country that have their own yeast strain that has been passed down for generations.

Well I got in contact with him, and as it turns out him and some friends have taken one such strain and propagated it and have sent it to homebrewers around the nation, who have propagated it and sent it on. And it just so happens that I'm going to get some next week!
I'm super excited as I was already planning on attempting a farmhouse ale using the same processes that he outlined on his blog from the farm this strain comes from!
It supposedly gives off some spice that's a little like Christmas spice flavor and an orange flavor and aroma. And the craziest part is that they pitch it at 40c! One guy even pitches at 43c.
Anyways just got really excited and wanted to share the news with this awesome community.

That's is bad ass!!! I stumbled upon his blog post that talked about raw ale and kveik and I was hooked, I spent a good hour on his blog just reading.
That very exciting stuff post your results here when your done!

Will do, just gotta figure out a safe and effective way to keep my ferment chamber around 40c!

i just read his blog for like 5 hours solid. i did see that you can buy the kveik strain from NCYC for like 140 ish US Dollars with a 70 ish dollars for shipping and handling. So you getting this for free is an awesome awesome thing.

any chance you would be willing to pass some of it down to the rest of us. would love to get my hands on this without spending $200.

I second that^^

I think he's working with one lab, though I can't remember which one (I'm sure it's on the blog somewhere), to get this developed and available to the masses. But who knows how long that will take?

I would be willing, even already had one pm about it. Though, I've never done a trade like this before, or a pay it forward type of thing. So I don't really know proper procedures for sending yeast. But I guess if this ones being fermented at 40c, then it could likely handle most shipping situations. I knew I should've been keeping back those WL empty vials for something!

This is an easy and cheap way to send yeast if you decide to go that route.

http://suigenerisbrewing.blogspot.ca/2013/04/mailing-yeast.html#A1

That is mega kick ass!
I contacted him about Lithuanian yeast before,without any joy

id be willing to pay the price for purchase of all the right mailing supplies and shipping cost to get it to me quickly. that way a cooled file or jar would be enough to get it to me in useable fashion.

thoughts?

Pm me and we can talk (Although can't respond until later when I'm home, the mobile app is being dumb). I won't even be getting it until next week, going out of town for a few days.

I'm planning on brewing in the traditional method as best I can with my equipment, but I'm not sure when I'll do that, cause the brew day can easily take 9 hours.
And I'm gonna see if some wild hops and wild Norwegian strawberries will be ready to pick this weekend on my trip. But I doubt it because it's been an unusually cool summer.

Well,bloody good luck with it.
Keep us up to date and post pictures.
Plz

Is the WLP6788 is an actual existing yeast or it just some kind of a cruel inside joke?

It's an actual yeast, but actually I tried finding it on WL's site, and couldn't find anything. My lhbs carries it regularly now. It actually came from another farmhouse brewery.

proof.

Cool! Excited to see how this turns out

Here's some stuff off of Milk the Funk.

"It is now possible for US customers to get this yeast drop-shipped from White Labs. If interested just send a e-mail to [email protected]"

Ha!
Now that seems worth an email

Free is always good! :rockin:

Just shot off an email about the WLP6788

That's my "lhbs." In quotations cause they're all over the country. They seem to be a pretty well put together company, and I get the feeling that it was just a bunch of homebrewers who needed a place to buy their stuff from. For being way up here, they always have a good variety of products from all over the world.

@joshesmusica
You have any idea how much postage might cost to Thailand?

badlee said:

@joshesmusica
You have any idea how much postage might cost to Thailand?

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i looked at that for sending packages of yeast from here to the US using posten.no. it seems it's one set international rate. No telling how long it takes. And no telling what conditions it would go through in that time. But it seems like it's around $33 US (depending on what the exchange rate is that day of course). Not sure how high temps the WL one can handle though.

Bugger!
That's me out

According to that blog the white labs strain is probably not the magic orange spicy strain.

No the white labs strain is def not the same strain.

Got an email back about having the wlp6788 drop shipped from white labs. They currently have a hard time with international payments, but they are currently in talks with MoreBeer here in the states about carrying this strain to make it more accessible for home brewers here

joshesmusica said:

No the white labs strain is def not the same strain.

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I'd love to give the Voss strain a go, but the White Labs strain sounds like it could be interesting too

alright got it last night. the guy filled a white labs vial with what seemed like a very weak starter. he decanted some of it for me to try and it had some character to it, but in general was very weak, and very watery.

there was definitely yeast in there, but there's no way for me to know how much, so i tried to look up step up starters, but all of them were giving advice on stepping up a normal sized vial to a large, high og batch. so i basically just decided to wing it.

i got onto beersmith and tried to see how much i would need of both water and extract in order to make a very small, 1.030 batch. it told me to go with 150g extract in 200ml water. This didn't seem quite right, but i started the boil anyways. It looked like molten syrup while it was boiling. i didn't like the looks of it, so i added more water. it probably amounted to around a half liter or a little over in the end. i whisked the hell out of it while i was cooling it to 40C. then i pitched the yeast and whisked the hell out of it again. then set it in my ferment chamber that i put a lamp in, in order to get that sucker up to 40C.

i should probably be shaking it really well and everything, but i don't have a stir plate, so i'm basically just letting it ferment as normal and shaking it every now and then. i plan to make a 1.040 (as much as i can guestimate) batch next and just pour it on top, since i've got plenty of room in the fermenter (it's a 6-liter bucket). i'm being way more careful about sanitation than i ever have been with my regular batches, because i really don't want any funky stuff getting in this thing. i've never had an infection, but they say that at our level you will always pick up small amounts of bacteria. not sure how much i believe that, but, yeah, just hoping this gets propagated into a bigger amount and stays pretty pure!

A normal starter is 100g DME in 1L of water which is around 1.040. That's a pretty heavy starter it's in. If it were me, I'd add some boiled and cooled water to it and aerate again.

PoppinCaps said:

This is an easy and cheap way to send yeast if you decide to go that route.

http://suigenerisbrewing.blogspot.ca/2013/04/mailing-yeast.html#A1

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This is easy and cheap, all you need is your own microbiology lab!

#noteasy
#notcheap

broadbill said:

This is easy and cheap, all you need is your own microbiology lab!



#noteasy

#notcheap

Click to expand...

I'm just working in a home kitchen with a pressure cooker that moonlights as a meat cooker.

Beyond that, you don't need fancy pipettors, centrifuge tubes, or an autoclave. You do need:
Petri dishes: $7 for 20
Agar powder: $1 per 20 plates
Mason jar
DME
Aluminum foil
Paper

That's it, and a little patience. I just traded some yeast this way with a couple guys, and I'm sure they don't work in a lab either. You don't even need the agar plates. Just take some slurry with a StarSan-ed spoon, drip it onto paper that's been pressure cooked in foil, wrap it, tape it up, mail it. On the receiving end take the paper out and drop it in some starter wort.

My apologies if you were only kidding, I just thought I would lay out a more simple version. That link over-complicates it.

PoppinCaps said:

I'm just working in a home kitchen with a pressure cooker that moonlights as a meat cooker.

Beyond that, you don't need fancy pipettors, centrifuge tubes, or an autoclave. You do need:
Petri dishes: $7 for 20
Agar powder: $1 per 20 plates
Mason jar
DME
Aluminum foil
Paper

That's it, and a little patience. I just traded some yeast this way with a couple guys, and I'm sure they don't work in a lab either. You don't even need the agar plates. Just take some slurry with a StarSan-ed spoon, drip it onto paper that's been pressure cooked in foil, wrap it, tape it up, mail it. On the receiving end take the paper out and drop it in some starter wort.

My apologies if you were only kidding, I just thought I would lay out a more simple version. That link over-complicates it.

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It was a bit tongue in cheek I admit. I like that this technique is out there, I was just thinking for all this work it may be easier to send someone either the slurry itself or a bottle of beer they could culture from.

PoppinCaps said:

A normal starter is 100g DME in 1L of water which is around 1.040. That's a pretty heavy starter it's in. If it were me, I'd add some boiled and cooled water to it and aerate again.

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yeah i guess making a recipe on beersmith doesn't really calculate it well enough for some reason. found a different tool on there and realized that with that amount of dme i should've had 1.8L! so i boiled up an extra liter and cooled and poured it in. now i know. i guess i just need to convert to pounds per gallon every time i want to figure it out on my own.

so now i have 1.8L of 1.030 wort.

i was thinking that since i have the space to go with 1L of 1.040 wort in a couple of days (or maybe tomorrow if it seems to be at high krausen, which sitting at 40C should encourage it to get there pretty quickly since it's already had some time with some nutrients). Then I could do that again with another liter, maybe go like 1.050 the third time?

I'm just trying to get a significant slurry going on with lots of healthy yeasts in order to split it multiple times for storage.

The first step up for the starter went pretty well. I thought I messed it up because activity died in the fermenter after only a couple days, and not only that, but the outside air had more pressure than the fermenter had. And I didn't see a yeast cake at the bottom by shining a light through it. So I was a bit worried. But then I tested the gravity, and it fermented out all of the fermentable sugars. So that was good. The guys in Voss ferment in only like 7 days, so I guess this is just a fast yeast (but I guess so at 40C!). Then I cold crashed it and got the yeast cake that I was looking for. So I think this is just not a quickly flocculating strain.

I sampled the "beer" and it definitely had some interesting aromas. I definitely get the orange that Lars was talking about on his blog, but then I didn't get much of the "christmas spices" that he talked about. But it was a low gravity wort, and hopless, so it's not gonna be completely like the actual final product. But I think it will definitely make for some interesting beers. I plan on trying it on all kinds of styles and trying out all different kinds of ferment temps. I really think it will make a good addition to an already existing orange summer pale ale recipe that i use.

Anyways, got the second step starter going last night, and it's buzzing away now. I think after this one I will likely have enough to fill a white labs vial with (just the yeast slurry, not the yeast and the starter "beer"), so I will likely do at least two more rounds of step ups after this. Then I'll be brewing the actual beer after that. Should be coming in the next couple of weeks.

broadbill said:

This is easy and cheap, all you need is your own microbiology lab!

#noteasy
#notcheap

Click to expand...

It is cheap & easy - and that's my blog, I've sent yeast to over 100 people, so I know:

To receive: Tweezers and a lighter. Sterilize tweezers with the lighter, cool, then pull the paper pad out of the foil envelope. Drop into sanitized (boiled & cooled) wort, and throw it on your stirplate. Most people do it without having to buy a damned thing extra. If you need to buy tweezers and a lighter, that'll set you back less than five bucks.

To send: Make tinfoil envelopes, put absorbent paper pieces into envelope. Tinfoil is generally around most peoples homes, absorbent paper (index cards work) are less than a buck for a lifetime supply. Sterilize in a pressure cooker (cost is free-$100, average for used is ~$25 on kijiji), and transfer yeast sediment from a starter using a sterile pipette. I generally recommend doing this next to an alcohol lamp or bunsen burner to maintain cleanliness. A pack of 100 individually wrapped sterile pipettes is $25 on amazon, I built my alcohol lamp out of scrap materials from my kitchen; to buy the parts new is a few bucks.

So worst case scenario, you're looking at a $50-$100 one-time start-up cost, which also gives you the materials (minus stamps + paper envelopes) to send out and receive few hundred yeasts.

So it is #cheap and #easy. If you can boil wort you too can do it.

Sending slurry is both much more expensive (you're paying for package mail, not letter mail), less reliable (freezing or overheating during transport is much more damaging with living slurry than dried inert cells), and can be illegal if crossing international boarders.

B

Warthaug said:

It is cheap & easy - and that's my blog, I've sent yeast to over 100 people, so I know:

...

Sending slurry is both much more expensive (you're paying for package mail, not letter mail), less reliable (freezing or overheating during transport is much more damaging with living slurry than dried inert cells), and can be illegal if crossing international boarders.

B

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I was about to ask why you don't just ship microcentrifuge tube samples, but I never considered international shipments. I'll have to remember that.

Update:
On the third and final build up of the kveik I somehow got an infection in it when I cold crashed it. It was super disappointing and incredibly frustrating.
But turns out my LHBS is pretty much just reproducing this often now, and giving it to people who are interested, so I got a new vial of it. This time around there was clearly more yeast in the sample, so that was nice.

After the first round of building it up I would guess I likely had about as much as you would get in a fresh white labs vial. I did 1L of about 1.037 (100g of dme) wort with probably about 1/8 tsp yeast nutrient. It looked to have fermented out in 24 hrs at about 30c, but I left it for another 24h and kept whirling up the yeast when I walked in the room. Then cold crashed it for 24h, this time in a closed glass jar. This fermented malt drink was at 1.009.

Last night, I started the second round of building it up. Decanted down to about 100ml of liquid left, with probably about 100ml of yeast on the bottom, this time pouring on top 1.5L of about 1.049 wort (200g dme), and about 1/8 tsp yeast nutrient. Again I have the room it's in up to about 30c, and it was going crazy already when I headed to bed; about 4 hrs after pouring in the new wort. This morning, about 12 hrs after, there were clear signs of a krausen that had dropped out. Though there was still a little movement in the wort. I'll still let this go for 48 hrs total, then cold crash for 24h again, then I'll likely start a third round with 2L of about 1.055 wort (300g dme), and follow the same procedure.
After that I will take some and make a new starter and make a beer with it. I made a small batch with some wild hops that I got, and I'll know how those taste in a few weeks. So I'll probably first either make a pale ale or a blonde with this yeast, and then after I see how the hops are, I'll make the Vossøl.

any tasting notes on the yeast itself? I taste most of my starter worts when i decant them (especially saisons) and Im pretty interested in this stuff. I read all those articles on the wooden yeast rings and everything

Yeah, it's so weak it's hard to tell exactly how the final product will be, but the way Lars describes it I think fits best: Christmas spices with orange overtones.