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bigchiefbc wrote:One is a smoked doppelbock

sorry for the stupid big photos. i'm kind of a moron and don't know how to smallerize them.

technicoloraudio wrote:sorry for the stupid big photos. i'm kind of a moron and don't know how to smallerize them.

No, no, don't apologize, it's all cool. That is one fuckin hell of a setup you got going on there. I'm extremely jealous.

How do you catch wild yeast?

well...

my employers have a mountain house in highlands NC that they let me use sometimes, sometimes i travel there with them. the air is much cleaner there so i figured i'd give it a go...this is what i did, there are other methods, but this worked.

i made 2 quarts of wort (unfermented beer) using the spring water from there and dry malt extract. i added about 6 little hop nuggets and boiled it for fifteen minutes. the you don't have to hop the starter wort, but the antiseptic properties of hops prevent gross nasty shit from thriving in your yeast trap. i then sanitized a dozen pint sized mason jars in boiling water for twelve minutes, then filled each about halfway with the wort. i put cheesecloth over the jars then used just the ring of the jar lid to secure the cheesecloth in place. i put all twelve jars out in various places. three in the cemetery, three under some apple trees, a few on the porch, and some up on this real picturesque vista motherfucker thing way up the mountain. left them there over night, went back the next day and picked them all back up, replacing the cheese cloth with aluminum foil that i sanitized with a blowtorch. then i drove back to atlanta, forgot about them for a while, and after two weeks i started opening the ones that had formed a little mini-krausen (the foamy schmeg that forms at the top of fermenting beer). two of them smelled pretty fruity and funky, so i poured those into some erlenmeyer flasks (cone-shaped scientific looking glass jar) filled with more starter wort and started growing up the yeast.

yeast consumes oxygen and sugar and fucks its own brains out recklessly reproducing more yeast and jizzing alcohol all over the place. the end product is beer, which has led me to believe that science and magic are the same thing.

That involved far less pokemon than I had hoped.
And yes, yeasties are horny little fuckers and thats why they are the prime example of why logarithmic growth can't be sustained.
Because they start drowning in their own waste.
But thats why I love them.

Fun fact, the reason you can only ferment to about 18% alcohol is because thats the point that the yeast start dieing off, poor little buggers.

WILD YEAST FROM A CEMETERY GOD FUCKING DAMMIT THAT'S COOL.

I just put an ESB into secondary and will probably brew an IPA or something this week. Then to get up the motivation and bravery to take on a Russian Imperial Stout for winter.

So I went out to cut down my hop vines for the winter. I had thought that I lost my whole crop this year because I wasn't able to harvest them when they were ready and most of the cones scorched and turned brown. It was my own fault and I was ready to just call this year a loss. But as I was cutting them down, I found that there were still a batch of good cones on two of my vines, and in fact one of my vines was almost totally green and still good. So I still got a little bit of a harvest! They'll go into the dehydrator tonight. The top bag is Mount Hood, and the other 3 are all Nugget hops.