When to call it quits?

[rgrim001]

I have been working on an experimental wild yeast cultivation and it has been roughly two weeks and smells really funky. I dont know how to describe it really. Vegetal maybe? Is this worth the two gallon jug space they are taking up? The SG has dropped from 1.045 to 1.020. To dump or not to dump?

 

[O'Haggerty]

Define wild yeast culture.... did you plate it out and actually isolate a yeast colony? Or did you pitch a swabbing of something you found (in which case it's probably a mix of multiple bacteria, fuzzy fungi and possibly yeast (also fungi). It's almost guaranteed an unisolated wild mix will have enough funk to ruin the potential of any good bacteria/yeast you may have caught. However, If you've come this far I would finish the project. It's not going to kill you to try it... you can always spit it out and dump the batch later.

I am doing an extensive wild culture project with a brewer friend here in town. We actually just sampled about 25 different sources around our city and swabbed them onto malt/agar slanted vials. From there I am going to isolate colonies on petri plates and pick/mix/match the individual cell lines as we see fit. Then we are going to test each sample in a 12oz malta goya bottle ("soft drink" found in the latin foods section... basically unfermented bitter wort made from caramel and pale barley malts plus a dash of hops (like 4 IBUs lol)). This makes testing really easy as with these I don't need to waste time prepping wort blanks... and we can pay 15 bucks and have 36 bottles to test our different combinations.

 

[rgrim001]

I am really interested in this actually. I've been talking to my college microbiology professor about it. I want to buy some plates and agar to streak it out. I just got a little overwhelmed when I initially started educating myself on it. Where would you suggest starting? What would be the basis tools needed?

-Plates
-Agar
-Inoculating loop
-Test tubes/vials

What else? An autoclave or something similar?

 

[rgrim001]

Also, how do you evaluate what you are looking at?

 

[tesilential]

I am doing an extensive wild culture project with a brewer friend here in town. We actually just sampled about 25 different sources around our city and swabbed them onto malt/agar slanted vials. From there I am going to isolate colonies on petri plates and pick/mix/match the individual cell lines as we see fit. Then we are going to test each sample in a 12oz malta goya bottle ("soft drink" found in the latin foods section... basically unfermented bitter wort made from caramel and pale barley malts plus a dash of hops (like 4 IBUs lol)). This makes testing really easy as with these I don't need to waste time prepping wort blanks... and we can pay 15 bucks and have 36 bottles to test our different combinations.

The guy who sold me my kegging stuff said he used to make starters using Malta, but I figured he was just doing it wrong, since he hadn't brewed in years and never got past extract brewing.

I'm from PR so I'm Very familiar with Malta. I never thought of it as an unfermented wort. To me it's sweet like a soda pop. And delicious