After having some good success with the Yeast Bank (tm) experiment, I decided to see if I could wrangle up a Wild Louisiana yeast for frozen storage. I made up a sweet, nutrient rich gelatin mold, using the basic directions for homemade Ballistics Gel. It's sorta like a cheap-o agar plate. I took the plate outside and held it under a few vines and limbs and tapped them in hopes of dropping any yeast onto the plate. I've since put the lid on the plate and will check it tomorrow for signs of growth. If I can isolate a yeast colony, I'll step the colony up to a full size starter and make a small test batch of beer to see if it's any good. If it is, then I'll add this yeast to frozen storage. I'm hoping I'll find a wild yeast that'll work for witbeers or belgian style ales. If nothing else, it'll be fun!
Has anyone else tried to capture some wild yeast from their area?

Cheers,
Dave

This sounds like a wonderful project! I considered using my small hops crop (three little cones) as an starter to see if good wild yeast inhabited my backyard. Forgot about the project and threw the whole vine into the waste pile. Oops.

Please let us know what you end up with. Usually we take great precaution to avoid wild yeast, it'll be great to see what happens if we give it a little encouragement.

In two years look for WYeast 9099 - Louisiana Wild Ale yeast!

good to hear that someone else is trying to capture wild yeast, dave. what is this ballistics gel that you mentioned? i have captured all kinds of stuff, mostly molds and spores, and i think maybe i'm useing the wrong medium to trap them. i have used potato-dextrose, dry malt extract-dextrose and tomato-maltose and i always use agar with them to pour into petre plates. i have had fairly good luck with wine yeasts by scraping the skins of grapes and fruits, but not much luck with beer yeasts, i'd be very interested in what you come up with, keep us informed.
gary

shineman wrote:what is this ballistics gel that you mentioned?

Really, it's just thick gelatin. It's made into large blocks or molds and is used as a target. 'Mythbusters' uses it a lot for shooting. If you've ever seen 'Deadliest Warrior', the dummy they use as a target is made of ballistics gel.
I use 1/4 ounce of of gelatin per 1/4 cup of lukewarm water. I allowed the mixture to hydrate for a couple hours in the refrigerator. Then I melted it on the stove and poured it into a mold.
The difference here is, I added sugar and yeast nutrient to the gelatin. I have no idea if this will work properly, it's just something I'm trying right now because I don't have any agar.

shineman wrote:i have used potato-dextrose, dry malt extract-dextrose and tomato-maltose and i always use agar with them to pour into petre plates.

I'd definitely use agar if I had any available at the moment. If I used agar, I would probably just save a quart of finished wort, and mix the agar into it. It seems like the most sensible thing to me. After all, maybe the alpha acids in the wort might help to prevent some bacterial growth!

I checked my plate today, and didn't see any growth. I'll be leaving for a couple of weeks, so I guess this experiment will be scrapped until then. I have an idea that might work better than this one anyway. We'll see. I'll keep youse guys updated.

thanks dave, i see what you are doing now, i have never used gelatin before but it sounds like it would work. i haven't used wort before, but one of my mediums is a pale malt extract mixed with yeast nutrients and agar with a small drop of hydrogen peroxide added to slow down the bacteria, so i guess it would be about the same thing. i have collected the yeast from the bottom of unfiltered beer bottles and grew them on plates but never produced enough to brew a beer with. still a lot of fun trying. have you ever made up a sourdough starter for bread? you might come up with something new to your neck of the woods that turns out great for pancakes or biscuits. keep on trying
gary

curlyfat wrote:In two years look for WYeast 9099 - Louisiana Wild Ale yeast!

Wouldn't that be something!
If you try out your hops cones starter, let me know how it turns out! If you end up with yeast and bacteria (likely) in your starter, you can try getting rid of the bacteria by using chloride dioxide tablets from Northern Brewer. It shouldn't harm any of the wild yeast you round up. I'd be very interested in hearing how a small test batch turns out with your wild yeast. If we get anything good, maybe there could be a wild yeast swap in the future?

gary,
I haven't tried to make sourdough starters yet. Maybe that's something I'd be interested in doing down the road.
Out of curiosity, why have you never tried to step up a yeast starter from one of your plate streaks? Or have you just been plating yeast as a fun hobby?

I'm quite certain that I can catch a few wild Louisiana yeast, but I'm not so sure that they'll taste any good. Still, it sure seems like it'd be good fun!

Cheers,
Dave

OK, I'm impressed... even a bit inspired! Not something I would have thought to do, myself.

It makes sense, though. Yeast has to come from *somewhere*!

i have transfered one strain, SNPA, to a liquid culture from a plate but didn't step it up enough to use for brewing, now that you got me interested i 'm going to give it a shot.
this culture stuff is just part of another hobby of mine that i've been at for quite a few years. brewing beer is my latest hobby and i'm not that deep into it yet, still got a lot to learn about brewing good beer, up to now i've stuck to the dry yeast that i get at the LHBS, but when i get my procedure down pat, then i can start experimenting.
gary

I ended up with a couple more days off before I have to head to work, and I decided to revisit this. First off, my gelatin cultures have started growing. Not surprising, there is a bit of mold on the plate, but it looks like there's some other critters on there too. The biggest problem I'm confronted with is, I have no real way of knowing what kind of critters they are. Some of them may be good brewing yeast, spoilage bacteria, or maybe just a bug that serves no useful purpose in beer. So, while I intend to let this grow and see what comes of it, I have taken another route to the wild yeast capture method.
Night before last, I did a quick stove top mash with some base malt, and added a bit of hops to it. I ended up with a large and small glass of wort. I've been leaving them open to the air outside of my house overnight for the last 2 nights. This morning, I am seeing signs of life out of the smaller glass. Nothing yet out of the larger one. I'll let them go for about two weeks, and see where they are. I know that I have some not-so-nice critters in the wort right now, but I understand that at some point (around the 2 weeks mark), the Saccharomyces will have out competed these organisms, and should be the dominant living organisms in the wort, if I have captured any. At this point, providing I don't have a mold problem, I'll decide whether I want to either make a test batch of beer with this 'starter', or plate the yeast so that I can isolate a single strain.
I'm still pretty stoked about this experiment. If you guys have any other ideas or comments, or make any headway with this, keep me posted!

Cheers,
Dave

i made a brew once and when i put it in the fermenter it was still a little warm for the yeast, so i set it in my cool room to cool down. after clean up and a few beers i forgot about my brew until the next day. when i got around to checking it i couldn't remember if i pitched or not and it looked like it was working so i just let it go. after two weeks in the primary i cold crashed it and carbed it up and it turned out different but very drinkable.
the reason i use petre plates is so i can isolate the different things that grow. get you a cheap microscope to see all the different bugs you got, you won't be sorry and it will really surprize you all the strange stuff floating around. when i do a sterile project i always leave one agar plate open to check how sterile my clean room is.
gary

I'll be coming back to this experiment in the very near future. I picked up a pressure cooker and some agar so now I can make sterile starter wort and hopefully isolate a single yeast strain on an agar plate. What I plan to do is to put a few berries into 250 ml of sterile wort and wait until I see signs of vigorous fermentation. At that point, I'll try to isolate a single yeast strain on an agar plate for storage. I know that Saccharomyces are not the dominant species residing on berries, but they will outcompete other organisms in the wort for dominance. Here's a link to some good information from Wyeast Labs:
http://www.wyeastlab.com/com-lambic-brewing.cfm
This bit is particularly relavant.

Wyeast Labs wrote:The following is a list of the cultures involved in true lambic fermentations and the sequence of activity:

* Enteric bacteria (3 to 7 days)
* Kloeckera apiculata (3 to 7 days)
* Saccharomyces species (2 weeks)
* Lactic acid bacteria (3 to 4 months)
* Brettanomyces yeast (8 months)
* Oxidative yeasts (8 months)