Wild yeast from honey

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I just bought some local honey and diluted it to 1.030 with distilled water and added some nutrient.

2 weeks later it looks like this. I am going to try plating in another week, but I have no idea what I am looking at. This look OK?
 

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Oh, it is alive alright. The question is whether or not it will grow up and try to kill me.
 
I'm going to plate before I use this to actually make beer, so I'm probably just being overly cautious. The white disc on top of the liquid is slightly fuzzy, so I'm afraid it might be mold growing. Really not sure.
 
You can collect the yeast and move it to a lightly hopped wort (made with barley) and pre-acidified, then it should be perfectly safe to drink

I don't think you have mold, krausen with wild yeast and honey looks weird, at least everytime I have collected from or grown yeast in honey, it looked like that
 
Fantastic! I'll add mix up some wort and grow it up one more stage before plating. What pH level should I shoot for?
 
Fantastic! I'll add mix up some wort and grow it up one more stage before plating. What pH level should I shoot for?
I think anything lower than 4.2 it's pretty safe as it will difficult the growth of anything other than yeast, and the hops will help too
 
There's no need to prop it further before plating. It makes no difference whether mold or anything else pathogenic is growing in there.

I also would not grow a culture intended for mead in wort or vice versa.
 
I was mostly intending to use the honey as the source of the yeast.

Does growing the yeast in mead have an adverse effect when I move it over to beer?
 
Does growing the yeast in mead have an adverse effect when I move it over to beer?
It's especially likely that the wild yeast cultured and propagated in simple sugar will have poor attenuation in beer. Propagating in sugar before beer fermentation even screws up the metabolism of normal brewers yeast.
 
That's wild (pun intended). Do you remember where you got that from?
About poor attenuation from yeast propped in sugar? Well, Kai has some data about yeast growth in sugar:
http://braukaiser.com/blog/blog/2013/07/07/yeast-growth-on-malt-and-sugar/
I believe I've also seen data for poor attenuation & sluggish attenuation in beers pitched with yeast propped in sugar. I can't seem to find that right now though, sorry.

Wild yeast in general has poor attenuation in wort, so by culturing in sugar it's greatly increasing the likelihood that the dominant strain can't ferment malt sugars very well. My personal experience with wild yeast propped in wort typically shows only around 55% attenuation. I would expect the dominant strain propped in simple sugar to be even lower.
 
I was mostly intending to use the honey as the source of the yeast.

Does growing the yeast in mead have an adverse effect when I move it over to beer?
It's not a problem on its own but it can be sometimes a problem, there is a brewery in the States that grows their yeast from their own honey

And my house culture was captured in honey as it was at the start of the lockdown and that's what I had, the yeast or blend of yeasts that's in there works perfectly and it can attenuate up to a 93%, it goes down to a 80% attenuation in the first two days

So yes, it's better to capture yeast in the fermentable you'll use it in, but that doesn't mean that it will never work, you'll have less chances to have something that works in beer but as you have seen, a professional brewery has captured successfully yeast from honey and I have captured yeast using a honey starter as the capturing wort
 
I will try wild capture again in wort.

Those vials are my second attempt at capturing from honey.

I threw some wort into my earlier attempt on July 1st, and it started actively fermenting within 2 hours.

First pic is July 2nd and the second is this morning (4th). It dropped so clear!

I will take a gravity reading and see how long it dropped when it finishes out in a few days.
 

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Sorry if this goes without saying, but you need a gravity before and after in order to gauge attenuation of the wort.
The honey water should fully ferment, lowering the FG of the mixture (and increasing apparent attention to more than it would be in wort alone).
 
I can approximate it enough to get a ballpark on attenuation. I dumped half of the original honey medium (1.030) and filled it back up with 1.054 wort. That would be roughly 1.042. I just pulled a refractometer reading and it is at 5 Brixx which translates to 1.006 for the SG based on 1.042OG. That seems pretty normal range to me considering that it had more sugar and less maltose.

It smells Belgian and fruity. I'll plate tomorrow and see what I can pull.
 
Plated yeast 2 days ago and it looks like this now. Anybody know how long I should wait before growing it up? Seems like there are already some single colonies I could pull.
 

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I need to check gravity and bottle this week if it is done. It smelled alright while it was fermenting, so I am hopeful.

Fingers crossed.
 
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