Caught wild yeast; ferments really cold

[westchesterBrewer]

I caught a wild yeast off of some apple skins from my backyard this past Fall. It made some really really awesome cider. Before attempting to plate out the yeast I decided to build up the yeast count a bit more via a starter on a stir plate to store the strain as a backup and also do a small ferment test.

After the starter finished on the stir plate about 48 hours later I attempted to cold crash the starter at 38*F to wash the yeast.

48 hours later of crashing and the starter never crashed. In fact there was an edge rim layer of bubbles and the starter was still cloudy. It was still fermenting with quite the CO2 activity.

Of all of the starters I have done using commercial ale yeast and crashed, the starter always always cleared up with no additional fermentation.

Has anyone ever encountered a yeast that ferments so cold? What have I caught?

 

[oceanic_brew]

I would be interested to see if yeast can acclimatize to the temperature drops we force on them.

Perhaps this yeast needs to go through the ringer a few times before it adapts to the environment.

It's also possible that the yeast has extremely low flocculation properties. I read in "Yeast" that some bread yeast for example do not share the same properties as beer yeast when it comes to flocculation. They just stay in suspension for a while.

Something to do with how the cells bind together or don't.

There are many variables you can change on the starter side to see if it performs different. OG, temp, aeration, nutrition, and time all play huge rolls but if it were me I would put that yeast through a number of starters to get It more used to thriving in the utopian world of cider and beer.

I'm guessing you are at a bit of a standstill since your yeast seems to be still fermenting. I would pour off whatever yeast is still fermenting into a sanitized jar and then make a starter with what's already flocculated.

It's very possible that you caught more than one yeast if you are just harvesting from a batch of wild fermented cider. You could employ some natural selection.

Very interesting! I'm excited to see where this takes you.