Hi.
It's July twentieth, twenty twenty two, and this is an encore episode of an ology I personally love. I don't love beer, actually, but I love this ology. So it's a great and often overlooked episode. So I'm taking a week to plan your grandpad's burial and funeral and taking a little bit of a break. I thought you might enjoy just a hot app about cold beers. Get into it.
I love you. Oh hi, Hi, there it's your weird step cousin Ali Ward, rumbling up to the family barbecue in a transam and offering you your first room temperature beer. Are you ready to get YEASTI okay, good. So this episode touches on something that is all over and inside you, devouring your garbage, single celled fungus that covers every surface of the planet.
Yeast.
It's also in beer. And I got a hot tip by being alive that people like beer and so on a recent trip to Portland, I was very generously chauffeured through the woods and to the shore on a road trip by the wonderful Sister Duo and my own personal merch Queen's Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch and they had
an inn at Rogue Brewery in Newport, Oregon. I got a tour and I sat down to chat with a microbiologist and food scientist about zymology, the study and science and practice of fermentation people, which is how you take a sack of grain and water and turn it into Dad's wash away the work day elixir. Now, before I take you on a quick tour, I want to confess two things. Number One, I used to pour beer on myself as a child in the shower. More on not
in a minute. Number Two, I read all of your reviews on iTunes and I silently thank each and every one of you. So this podcast is a one hundred percent independently made a lot of people I guess didn't know that. So listeners pay to keep it going through life sustaining Patreon donations at patreon dot com, slash ologies, and also by buying merch at ologiesmirch dot com, and also for supporting for free by rating and reviewing and subscribing on iTunes, which boosts it in the charts. It
helps the podcast get seen by other people. So we've remained in the top thirty or so science podcast totally independently on iTunes since September, and last week Ologies broke its own download record. It truly means a world to me, and this project is my favorite thing I've ever worked on. So I love that you guys love the show and are spreading the word. So each week I read a snippet of a review that really made my day, and at least ten twenty one said I love this podcast
so much. Some episodes I start listening to and have no interest in the topic, and by the end I'm so fascinated and intrigued. For example, I almost skipped Ichthyology because fish who Cares? And that was my favorite episode to date. Okay, back to simology. So the word it comes from the Greek naturally for the workings of fermentation, it's pretty straightforward, Zimo and Louis Pastor was the first zymologist. He was the first person to get the yeasts were
making fermentation happen. Oh. Also, the reason I showered myself in course as a child is because beer was supposed to make hair shiny, and I had lama hair and even my parents were like, sure, man, try to do whatever you gotta do, and it didn't work. And to be honest, I've never really loved beer, but I have mad respect for the craft of it and the bubbly, yeasty science of it, and I'm fascinated by the history and the role that beer plays in good old American culture.
So I visited this brewery to find out how beer is made in both small and big scale batches, and to chat with someone who's truly deeply knowledgeable about tiny funguses. So, amid some forklift beeping and tasting room hollering in the background, we walked through a maze of like these twenty foot metal tanks storing and fermenting beers. That's a lot of bruskies. Did We learned some basics.
How familiar are with homebrewing?
No?
None, zero, that's basically all the CO two blowoff so is experimenting.
Yeah, so that's where it burbs and farts.
Yeah, pretty much.
I sniffed some yeasts. That's some ripe business. And I learned that the staff of this brewery gets to pick their own titles. So I was told this by a guy named Jake, who is technically Rogues level ten spirits wizard. It's on his business card. He showed me a warehouse of aging whiskeys and charred oak barrels, and we won't get into that much in this episode, but I will leave you with the takeaway from him that the opening of a barrel of aging spirits is called the bunghole,
and they smell delicious. I wanted to add scented candle and in the flavor of bunghole. Then our group checked out the yeast lab and sat down to a very mellow tasting. Am I gonna get sir?
What?
Finally we went in for the interview and talked about the history of cold ones and how beer goes from a slurry of wet fungus in a bucket to a refreshing, cool friend in a bottle, and the grossest things you can culture and make into beers. There's some home brewing tips, some food science triumphs, and some early names for light beer that just didn't quite cut it. So get ready to tip back this refreshing episode with zimologist Quentin Sturgeon.
Well, my first name is John, actually, so I go my middle name, So yeah, my phone name is John Quentin Sturgeon. It's not a weak name. Any means no, it's.
Not tell me what you're idol is here QAQC.
Manager or lead. But my actual title is a Minister of Truth.
Did you get to pick that?
It was? Yeah, but it was kind of given to me. They're like, yeah, you just you don't have a filter.
So truth is it kind of like a tribal name where it's given to you based on your characteristics.
You know, most people pick them themselves, so it's like a self given nickname. And it wasn't. I wasn't given to me. Somebody actually mentioned it.
So every time you're wrong, does that really come back to bite you? Uh?
Oh, I just don't ever be wrong. But no, no, of course doesn't mean I'm correct. Means I'm just telling the truth as best I know it, your true, my version of the truth. Yes.
Now tell me about your degrees. What did you study? How long did you study it?
Yeah? So my bachelor's was in food science at Universe Idaho, and then I made the epic eight mile track across state border to Washington State and got a master's in food science.
What does that entail? Getting a master's in food science?
A laborious person, this project that includes everything from sensory to microbiology, a lot of biochemistry. I had a resurrect in old HPOC.
What's an HPLC.
It's a high performance liquid chromatography.
So Quentin has two degrees in food science, one of masters that involved analyzing amino acids in wine fermentation. But he had a history with beer and began home brewing at nineteen in his fraternity's kitchen. And he's a burly dude. He's very Pacific Northwest. He's like wearing a hoodie. He's got a beard, those car hearts pants and a battered ball cap. And Quinton's worked in wheat genetics, cheese, wine, beer, kombucha, all involving, in his words, one cell critters that nobody
cares about. But hello, hi, if you like cheese and beer, you have to care about these critters. They're so important. So yeast r indeed single celled fungi. And it wasn't until the late eighteen hundreds, after Louis Pastor, that we even knew that a living organism, a fungus, was instrumental in brewing and baking bread. And we put some shit under microscopes, we were like, whoa huh, well, why do
you look at that? Now? A common bruise yeast to make ales in particular is a single round, smooth, flat cell and it's kind of a cream color. It's called sachromiaces servasia something like that, which translates to sugar fungus of beer. So not unlike Minister of Truth. It's a good title. So what is happening? Can you walk me through what fermentation is like? Just for tend I'm an alien that just landed on a spaceship and my first question is like, how y'all make booze?
Yeah? Well, and basically you can choose something up and spit into a bucket or really it's the conversion of sugar and starch. Well, starch goes to sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide, and that.
Is done by introducing a little tiny single cell critter one, so little.
Fun guy, sacrimices, And we'd like to use sacramice the SERVICEA because it's more consistent and not nearly as temperamental and pissy as all the other eastrains. So that's why you see that Sacrimices SERVICEA as the go to yeast.
Is that for wine and for beer?
Wine and beer, but they are different strains.
So how do you choose which strain to use?
So that's actually that was what I did after grad school. That was ninety percent of my job was because all there's all sorts of east vendors out there. All these vendors have all this yeast. You don't know what is sales and marketing and what's true.
Do you have to culture them and see what eats what and what the byproducts are and what temperatures they can withstands to hide.
Basically the best way to do it if you're going to be doing like I think I did one hundred and fifty something strains when I was there in just over a year in triplicate with little bioreactors that are temperature controlled. You take sterile juice and you dump in the exact the amount of yeast three times, and then you ferment it and you track everything you can chemically before and after enduring, and then you try it at
the end. And basically that's it. Because you worked off the same juice for all those YA strains, You've got the same baseline. And all right, this one was farty. That one's awesome party is a term?
Is it really?
Yeah? H twos? Yeah, it is a nasty it smells like fart.
Wait, do you use that term professionally like this one I have?
It depends on how lax the panel would be. Okay, but yeah, I mean everything from rotten cabbage, sewerdrain. Oh yeah, since your terms get fun? Yeah, and how do you how do baby vomit is? One?
That baby vomited is when you're fermenting something and it smells like baby vomit or cabbage farts or whatever. Are you making notes on smell and compounds? Are you analyzing them through your own senses or a combination of like chemical determinants and your sense in both?
So, I mean the human knows unless you can in sensory terms, it's useless. Right. You tell somebody, all right, cool, you have x and x milligrams per leader of vanilla. Well, vanilla's one vanilla. That's pretty simple. Then you say, isopluric acid?
Yeah? Where the hell's that?
Yeah? Exactly? So I mean that's just it alor like yeah, some of these terms, and when they get just down to chemicals, I don't know what the hell does that mean or where did that come from? How do I control is it a good or a bad thing? It gets way too complex when you just do on the chemistry, so you focus it down into flavor buckets and just make it easy. But sensory, I don't know. Your nose
is still amazing. And if you can train yourself to be as good of a machine as possible, setting yourself up pretty well.
Side note, isn't it weird how you smell something and it usually reminds you of your past in some way, Like if you huff a perfume your freshman year of college, like forget about it, Like you are a slave to nostalgia for the rest of the day. So why is that? Why does that happen? So I looked it up, and smell is linked in intimately to parts of the brain that deal with emotion. So you have an old factory bulb that's part of the limbic system that includes the
amygdala and the hippocampus of the brain. Those also deal with memory, learning and your emotions. So in order to identify a smell, you may find that first you have to figure out what does this remind me of before you can figure out what the smell is. So humans have about six million ol factory receptors, and scientists recently learned that we can smell up to a trillion smells.
But your dog, see your dog over there, Your dog has not six million, three hundred million compared to our six million, So every butt sniff is like Shakespeare to them. I would now like you to imagine a dog in a lab coat, because, as a food scientist sniffing stuff in this case yeast, super important. Dogs would be excellent at this. So when you applied for this particular job, did you come in saying I have a lot of experience testing the yeast and they were like, we need you on our team.
Uh, I have enough jack of all trades background to be able to do something like this, but yeah, a ton of lab and micro experience. So it was like, cool, we can shove this guy in there and leave him alone.
What's your day to day job?
Like, oh god, it is literally one third microbiology, one third chemistry, and one third century and then trying to make sure we don't kill anybody by making beer or floating bottles and that kind of stuff.
So if you have the chemistry wrong, your bottles will explode.
Not so much the chemistry, the microbiology, because then you've got potential for secondary fermentation. So when you pop that top, you might shoot a cap into the ceiling, or it will just build up so much pressure that the glass itself will shatter. And then, yeah, I mean that's the worse, worst, worst case scenario. I don't know if that happening here. So that's good.
Can you want through the basics of like, in an absolute nutshell, how is beer made?
So malt is the sugar source. Our starch converts starch into sugars, which the yeast, which we'd then later add, chomps up and converts, through its own metabolism from glucose and sucrosa maltose into ethanol and carbon dioxide. So then you get basically, beer is yeast farts and piss and other flavorings.
Okay, how much do you already love this guy? Now? I'm going to recap and give you some basics because I had to look this up after our interview and after the tour because I still didn't get it. I'm gonna break it down. You're about to understand how beer is made? Are you ready? You're never gonna look at beer the same way again. And next time you're at a barbecue and you have nothing to talk to anyone about,
you can just tell them this okay. Cool, So grain like barley or wheat is malted, and malted means it's germinated just a wee bit and then it's kilmed or heated, and that stops the germination. So doing that german and heating it breaks down some starch into sugar. And next it's milled or crushed so that the starches are more accessible and they're easily broken down. Water is then added,
and when it's added, it's called a mash mashing. It's added to this big tank called a mash ton, and it's mixed with hot water and that activates the enzymes in the grain that helps turn them from starch into sugar, and it makes this syrupy sweet liquid called wart. And the wart is separated from all the solids left over in the grain in a process called watering, so many terms. So the wart is then boiled for a few hours which sterilizes it, and hops are added, giving it some bitterness,
some essential oil, some flavor. And this mix is whirlpooled to collect any solids, and then it's cooled down and finally, after malting, milling, warting, mashing, after all of that, it's ready for fungus. It's fungus o'clock. This is called pitching. Now the cooled downward, it's put in this big fermentor tank and yeast is added and it ferments anywhere from a few days to a month, depending on the beer, and the type of yeast will also determine if it's an ale or a lagger.
I did not know that fermentation really in the bulk of it actually happens in the first seventy two hours, but generally we have tank times that range anywhere from eight days to twenty plus days.
Okay, And there are hoses that run out the carbon dioxide. And it sounds kind of like a rhino farting in a bathtub. Fuck. That gurgle is very soothing. And now you has beers almost.
And then basically you remove the yeast if you want, and so you get a clear product, a more stable product because of all sorts of biochemistry. But it is much more stable than it was before the east took effect. And so carbonated up for some good mouth feel and fizz and there you go. That's beer. It is simple.
So you carbonated after the fact, yeah.
Yeah, So a good portion of the carbonation will come from natural fermentation, but not enough. It's not that lively bubble pain bubble break that you experienced with beer, where soda has so much more carbonation. Yeah, because you do that, that's a term, is bubble pain, and it's I feel those like pop rocks right exploding on your tongue. Yeah, that's the kind of thing as.
A person who's literally drinking a lacroix right now and trying not to burp into the microphone. I was greatly enthused about bubble pain as a term, and I looked it up. Gidaly and carbonation does thrill us because it triggers pain receptors on the tongue, the same ones that respond to like wasabi. Now, some people hate carbonation because it just hurts. They're like no, But I couldn't find much mention of the specific term bubble pain. I looked it up. I was like, I thought this was a
term until I came across an article about it. But it was published by a researcher at Quentin's alma mater. So it's possible that this term is super common to Quentin in the way that as in Northern California. I thought everyone said Hella all the time, and so you have to strain off the yeast when you're done fermenting it to where you want it. You've used a centrifuge for that.
We use our s interfuge, yeah, to just get rid of it, and the clarifies the crap out of that beer. More typical you'll see a filter beforehand or after to really clarify it. And we do pretty well with our senterfuge, and we just run with that.
What happens to the yeast once you're like a later day is.
Thanks, it goes into a tote and then into a dump vessel. But that's not to say that we haven't pulled off east before that. And we will reuse that yeast over and over, and so once we start with a little bit, it will grow and grow and grow many many babies, and we harvest that off and use it again.
What does it look like? Is it like a murky I imagine something that looks like murky yellow whale blubber.
That's I mean, so.
You're holding up a bottle of beer, so it's kind of the it's kind of that murky precipitate in there.
Yeah. Yeah, it just looks muddy murky and hazy, just kind of all sorts.
To know good and do different beers use different yeasts or do you use that one? Do you use that one's species and genus but a different strain for say a logger ipa.
So yeah, we use anywhere from five to upwards of whatever test patches we're doing of random idea of beer strains here at Rogue. Pac Man is the one we use by far and away. It is a workhourse of a yeast. They can just power through a huge amount of sugar. But yeah, we definitely use them because they do different things. You know. Some are more phenolic, more band aid, more spice notes, some are more fruity. Others are just clean and neutral, and sometimes you want that.
It really depends on the style and what you're trying to go for in the finished product.
So pac Man is the name of a special proprietary strain that Rogue uses for a bunch of their beers, and it's supposed to be really robust and reliable. People love this. I looked online and some people try to use the dregs of other Rogue beers to culture their own pac Man batch. And one message board I looked at said this pac Man is the most forgiving yeast ever. I had to pitch some slurry that just finished a cider ferment as an emergency measure, and it still got
like eighty percent attenuation in an all grain ward. What okay? So thanks to Quentin, I kind of know what that jargon casserole of a sentence means. So you can buy yeasts, you can try to culture them from other beers, or if you're like some wild animals, you can just wait for fruit to rot. Evidently, moose and elk eat fallen apples and they stumble around a bit, they get a little crazy, and some monkeys will eat fermented fruit and
just lose it. Elephants, however, seem to be apocryphal drinkers. It's more legend than lit because it would take so much fruit to get them drunk. But if you've ever brewed kombucha at home or wanted to, the yeast and
bacteria form this symbiotic colony. It looks like a slimy pancake or a flap of skin from a dead sting, right, And essentially all you need to do is convince a hippie to give you some of their mother slop and you dump it into a bucket of tea and sugar, and boom, A few weeks later, you have an expensive bucket of busy vinegar tea. I've done this and it filled the void in my life where a pet or an alien in the cupboard should be. It tastes good,
but it looks like a nightmare. Do you ever dream about yeast?
I haven't lately I have, Yeah, I mean, I've got a stuffy yeast on my desk really yeah, yeah, yeasty. He's a stuffed one million size times size of a sach My service and he's got dreepy little eyes and he's got butting scars on the head. Well, I guess she called mother cells and daughter cells, but yeah, yeasty. When I was separated, when not separated, but my wife was cross country. I was interning in California and she
was working in New York. I sent that to her as a care package and kept it and held it like which, you know, it seems really really weird. I guess I'm just that level of a nerd. But I did propose to you or after we saw each other that summer, so yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's.
Part of your wooing. You're like, here's a stuffed YaST think about me.
Yeah, that's cute thinking about it. That's kind of weird.
No, it's a torrible Did you grow things and culture things when you were a kid. What kind of kid were you?
Uh no, I definitely I had a microscope. But I was kind of like, well, these are like really funny names and hard to remember. I wasn't all that interested. Is to be honest, I don't know. I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do going in Well, in high school, I don't know. I mowed lawns. I mean I paid for my undergrad by mowing lawns.
Did you really?
Oh yeah, I was like eleven years old. My dad's like, hey, you're going to pay for college. So right there, it's two things aside. Number one, I'm going to college, that's not an option to not. And I was going to pay for it. So all right, cool, eleven year old walks cross the streets. Hurts a moment, law, Where did.
You put all the money into a banking account?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, just straight savings and yeah, it's kind of crazy.
Are your parents proud of what you do? I think so that sound in the background is a level ten spirits wizard cackling at Quentin. Your buddy is laughing.
I don't know, I haven't heard. Like, we're proud of you, son. You can get everyone drunk, make the world a better place. I'm so proud of you.
But you have a laboratory I do, and a master's an master's degree.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think they have anything to I think they're more proud of the grandkids of you.
Did your wife wish that she could just butt off a baby like a yeast?
Yeah, pregnancy was rough, that's not It wasn't fun. Shannon's deliberately like a champ. But yeah, oh yeah, like poster child. But but no, pregnancy was rough.
Yeah, it was beer helpful afterward, some beer. She's not a big drinker, she's not your wife is not abuser, not a big drinker.
When she does, it's more of the sour tart stuff, which I mean she can peel and eat a lemon, but I know that's the face silt make when she does it. It's like it's unbelievable and good God, I just hear your enamel screaming. But no, I mean we started making a Paradise pucker, which is a sour base and she loves that beer, but she's just not a huge drinker. So yeah, there's that you I know right.
I'm going to ask you some questions from listeners, is that Tully, because there's approximately one million of them, this is a rapid fire around. But before your questions, let's toss back some money to a charity of the ologists choosing, and this week it's going to the Rogue Foundation, which since its inception, has donated millions of dollars to charity, including acts like donating all the Juneteenth pump sales to
the Coalition of Communities of Color. They donated beer to Project Pooch and the Oregon Zoo and the Newport Symphony. They renovated ask Gate Park in pouls In, Montana, where I happen to have many relatives. Hey, Paulson and Rogue Foundation is also sponsored beach and riverside cleanups in and a bunch more so, we will make a donation to them thanks to sponsors of the show, which you mean you're
about now? Okay, your curiosity is a bruin. Greg wants to know any secret ease that might make for better fermenting beers.
Try everything you can from wherever you can get it. There's a lot of places at homebrew stores that or try culturing your own and see what's growing out. Yeah, I see what happens. What's the worst? You just make a terrible batch of beer and then you trumpet clean everything and start over.
Well, how do you know that you even have?
You?
So you put the work out and see what happens.
Well, there, I mean a couple of steps. You can easily get stuff to get your own Peter dish set up and just to start culturing. I mean you can be into it for less than fifty bucks. Well yeah, I mean you just need a couple of glass where and you just make a small little batch of work, set it out in an orchard or something like that, and throw it on some dishes. And there's home technique to it. But it's not impossible.
Wow, diy yeast.
It's a thing.
Bob Ogden wants to know when and where did hops come from in brewing? Are hops used for any other purpose? Do we even use hops? What are hops doing on the rest of the time?
Good question. Well, I guess they're kind of an offshoot of hemp and so I believe they were at one point used for rope along those lines. They're also like a subset of like pot. I think they're somehow related to marijuana, but I don't. You're gonna have to fact check me on that.
One side note, so hops aka humulus ulus humuusless lupulous, I think that's what they're called, and marijuana are indeed related, but instead of getting you all stony boloney hops were cultivated for use in beer as early as the ninth century because they have these acids and essential oils that prevent oil. They also give beer that traditional bitter taste that a lot of people who are not me like, is now an okay time to tell you I've never finished a beer. I've maybe once I finished a beer.
I've started a lot of beers, but I really appreciate the craftsmanship. Adrian mcnabeles wants to know is it true that stouts and porter are good sources of dietary item I eat? Is my beer health food?
There was a guy who lived off nothing but guinness for a month. Really and it's totally doable. Yeah, especially unfiltered because you have the pro and prebatics of yeast. Okay, so yeah, I mean you people have done it. It's got a ton of nutrients in there. It's got to be doing something weird your system after a while.
Did he take a sabbatical from pooping? What was the deal there?
I don't know. And you're on a juice diet. You're not getting a lot of fiber that way, it's all pure liquid.
Who was this guy? Was this someone you knew?
Or was this? This is not Larry from my freshman year? Now I've I had heard this. This is like this. I don't know a thing.
Oh yeah, I'll look it up. Okay, So the Guinness diet is a thing. And though I found accounts of one super devout Christian slash beer lover giving up food in favor of beer for forty days of Lent, I guess he was inspired by monks, he did not seem to be drinking guinness per se. So with a Guinness diet with a stout, you'd need to drink forty seven pints of guinness a day to get your caloric needs met.
This was calculated by a one hundred and seventy pounds dude who tried it plus to fulfill your daily nutritional requirements, you would need to drink a glass of orange juice for vitamin C and two glasses of milk for calcium. So I looked up records of people who've tried this, and one account, which ran in a newspaper article in the Sonoma Sun, contained a diary from which I will read an excerpt. Day three. At one point, after enough people told me that I look like I'm dying, it
all became clear. I know what hell is. Hell is a giant party where you can drink all the guinness you want. Only your friends can eat the delicious feast, and they will laugh at you, and they will constantly make comments like you look like you're dying. Another man tried the Guinness diet and reported that, after having a couple of lunch beers, quote, my stomach was starting to
make noises comparable to the dragons on Game of Thrones. Now, it should be noted that both dudes who wrote their trials up of this broke down around day four or five and ravenously purchased and bought candy bars. One was a Snickers and one was a Mars bar. So, unless you are deeply alcoholic or religious, you may want to just do like slim fast or step up the cardio. Buddy Caitlin Thomas wants to know why does beer have to have so many carbs?
Well, that's the whole idea of between it light and beer, right, you're trying to get those carves out. It's just a matter of what you use. Are your sugar sores and what's going to be left over. The YaST is not going to consume, and so it's one of those factors. If you want to have less carbs in your beer, you got to use the U strain and set it up that it's going to ferment out pretty dry. But at the same time, carbs are a complete balance with
all the other flavors. So without carbs, you're just going to have a boozy, watered down, unbalanced hop mess. Yeah, like that is totally They're necessary. I mean, it's the sugar. It's all the sweet and a lot of the multi biscuit flavor. It's all from the mall and the carbs.
Do light beers have they been fermenting longer or do they just add water to a regular beer.
It's a different sugar source, so it fermends out cleaner, and so you end up having just more ethanol and more CO two, so it's more efficiently converted. Okay, I mean there's a lot of other technology into it, but I mean, so that's why it was a big thing when it hit the market. I think Miller Light was the first one.
Yeah, I said, yeah, like I knew what he was talking about, but I did not know. However, after doing some light googling, I have learned that this beer, Miller Light, was invented in nineteen sixty seven, but was originally called Gabblinger's Diet Beer. So they tweaked the marketing because, I mean, it was.
Pretty revolutionary to actually be able to have a beer around one hundred galleries.
Right, I love it, Like make a lobe ultras Like if you like crossbit and beer, you're like, okay, Like.
No, I'm sorry those you don't exist.
Brittany Krassa wants to know what ingredient is it that makes the yeast occasionally go seemingly crazy and foam up and explode during first fermentation, asking for a friend, Also, do you have any tips for new brewers or book recommendations?
Yeah, so that explosive early fermentation we have it I mean, we'll blow over our tubs and we use fifty five gallon drums as are blowoff. But it depends largely on how much protein was in the initial frumentation and then how much yeast they added. If they added just too much, your fermentation just went crazy and that yeast is just really, really,
really active. So there's a couple of ways to get around that is, get a bigger vessel saw that foam breaks off or just stays in the vessel, or don't had as much yeast, or keep it in a bathtub with some ice. Chill it down because I mean, during your fermentation there's a lot of heat generated as well, so you have to chill that down otherwise it will just run off and go real fast.
Is it better to homebrew if you're new at it during the winter months than in the summer.
If you've got an inkling to do it at all, just do it. But I mean, as far as going back to the tips for homeber, sanitation got to be clean, and if you think you're clean, do it again. I've had so much bad homebrew because they didn't clean something properly, or they oh no, I just ran bleached through it. No, Well, it's just not enough. You gotta do it right.
What happens if you don't brew it clean? Does it start to does the wrong thing? Ferment? Does it smell skunky? Okay?
So you set yourself up for any and everything to have access to all that sugar, all those free amino amino acids, and they're gonna go crazy. And so that's why you sack mice service started to use because it's such an active from enter it'll just attack and it'll drive out now compete most other things. So that's why it's really really beneficial to use a good healthy yeast. But sanitation, yeah, it's kind of key because you don't
want like a cedar bacter. A seedar bacter makes acetic acid, which is vinegar, or like a lactic acid bacteria or pediacccus which makes lactic acid, Whi's not as tart, but it still will ruin a beer and it's like sour milk.
Is Laia coccus pediacccus, my shitless.
Yeah.
Are you a clean at home? Are you a neat freak at home? Or are you like not?
No, Like the worst is the kitchen sink and my wife will rip she does totally rip anyone. It is the dirtiest place in your house.
Oh say it is so? Oh? No? Ugh? Okay, So I have often heard and feared this about kitchen sinks, and I had to look it up with all and according to doctor Charles Gerba, one microbiologist who's been studying invisible American domestic filth for decades, your sink and sponge are like bonnaroo, a witch's brew of fecal bacteria, protozoans, and viruses. So he says that the cleanest looking kitchens are often the dirtiest because clean people wipe up so frequently.
It's like painting a swath of bacteria, like Bob Ross laying down the background of a gorgeous landscape. Now. Amusingly, some of the cleanest kitchens, doctor Gerba claims are in the homes of bachelors who rarely wipe up their countertops. He says, in most cases, it's safer to make a salad on a toilet seat than it is to make one on a cutting board. So what are we supposed to do? Uh? Well, you can either microwave or sponge for a few minutes and kill all that stuff, or
you can survive off beer and snickers. I'm going to leave it up to you.
But in your lab, oh, in the lab, Yeah, that's a completely different story. So I get all my neat freak out of my system here and then go home. It's just like a slob.
Oh God, that would drive me crazy, that would because it's be like, I know you have a master's in science, Like, I know you know how to wash these dishes. Megan Gerard wants to know. I heard that we have found ancient civilizations had beer recipes. Do we know if that was because they couldn't prevent it, like there was no refrigeration, or do they do it on purpose? Are they any
good ancient beer? I understand was because the water was so disgusting that they're like, we got to have this stuff that has alcohol in it so you can kill the bacteria. Is that correct?
Yeah? I mean I actually do really you help yourself out from you killing like things like interobackter e coal.
I side note them bacteria's pooh that.
Kind of stuff, because it can't survive in that low pH You can't survive with a little bit of alcohol on there. Hops were added way after the fact. I mean we're talking beer. It's four thousand years old. At least, we haven't known what the hell we were doing, except until past year came by kind of like, oh wait, no, this is not just God blessing you with this alcohol. It's no, it's yeast. It's yeast pissing farts. That's what you get, little tiny, single cell But I don't know.
I have heard of some people trying to recreate really ancient beers and then kind of being so so yeah, but you also kind of like, I don't really know how they did it.
Okay, So a little beer history. It could have been invented up to ten thousand years ago when agriculture was first starting out around Mesopotamia and bread yeasts were fermented into this drinkable potable I guess I used that loosely concoction. So early beers were often really thick, like more of a gruel like a soupy oatmeal, and drinking straws were used so that you wouldn't get the chunky bits. How
gross is that? According to Wikipedia, though in ancient Mesopotamia the majority of brewers were probably ladies, Brewing was a fairly well respected occupation during the time. And then at some point it became less chunky and I guess more manly. From a societal standpoint, Brian Edge wants to know, is it true that there's a hops shortage or an impending one, and if so, what effect does that have on the brewing industry?
There certainly was I think was it Yakama six ten years ago, somewhere in that range. One warehouse had I think one third of the entire United States hop harvest in just the one building and it burnt down. Oh my god, overnight. Everyone's scrambling and host umm. Yeah. So that immediately bumped beer prices up and they just have never really gone down.
How insane is that? Okay, Well, evidently it happened again just this past December in another hops warehouse in Yakama. Now, before you open up your own arson investigation detective agency, apparently these things just happen acids in the hops break down and the hops heat up to the point where they just burst into flames. So things like this are why beer can cost you some money. Is it cheaper to bring your own beer?
Yeah, totally depends on what you throw into it. If he's throwing in like rice syrup, solids as your base fermentable as it's fairly cheap. Okay, well you're not gonna get a lot of flavor out of that, and so you get what you pay for and you get what you pay to put into it too.
PJ. Anderer wants to know what's happening to a beer. When I bury it in my yard and wait to drink it for several.
Years, it's probably not gonna taste all that good. Okay, it's just because the aging cycle is not good. Time is not good to beer.
Okay.
There's a couple of places that on the label is best yesterday. You know it was just totally true. I mean, the best way to have the best beer is keep it cold and drink it fast. I mean, some beers are men to age, like a barley wine.
Side note, I did not know what barle wine was. I pretended to during the interview, but I just looked it up and it's technically a beer. It just has such a high alcohol concentration, like eight to twelve percent, that is called a wine. So barley wine barely wine.
We did a flight of barley wine or Old Krusty. I think the oldest bottle we opened was twenty years old. Oh, we jumped every four years. So good. Okay, they're so good.
But that's on porpoise.
That was totally on purpose. Yeah. Yeah, if you bury it in your yard, you're gonna have incredible temperature fluctuations. Hell if it freezes. If I just shattered that bottle.
That's good point.
Yeah, so that would be my concern on that one.
All right, So no buried treasure. Jude Kenny wants Jude Kenny wants to know is there a particular region in the US that's favorable for open fermentation, Like, are there better airborne yeast in certain regions?
No, Well, it depends on what is around you. I mean, if you're buy orchards and a lot of agriculture, there's just a lot more stuff on those leaves, especially yeast. Now, so I mean, if you're near a vineyard, there's a ton of yeast that lives outside of grapes on the surface of them. That stuff's going to get flown off in the wind. I see, you got a better chance at least getting a yeast, but capturing good ones yeah, well also bad ones. So that's a mixed bag.
Oh, that's risky.
It is super risky. I mean, open fermentations are very They're just a risky because you don't know what you ain't yet and you're also going to get a lot of bacteria.
Okay, quick aside. In twenty thirteen, Rogue Brewery was looking to make a beer with a wild yeast and they tried some open fermentations and some nearby orchards but didn't come up with much. They were like, so it's a semi joke. They tried to culture some yeast using twelve beard hairs of their brew master. This wild yeast, the wildest of yeasts, really ended up being a pretty good
fit to culture and genetically. They found out it was a hybrid between the breweries pac Man yeast and some new strain, so they made a beer out of it. They put the beer on the mark it and people liked it, saying it had a sweet, ready, pineappoly and oddly olive like notes. So the idiom to get a wild hair will never be the same to me. But you can open ferment or try wild strains, it just might not be for beginners. Is it better to get a kit and try to culture something and see what happens?
It is definitely if you're just getting started to buy something that's already cultured, and that way you can't really screw it up. You can start slow, but yeah, get into it. And then to culture your own east, that's like just jumping in. That's a couple of steps.
But in general near an orchard would be a good place for excermation. Okay, Carrie Stewart wants to know to craft brewers maintain their own hops and yete strains like proprietary blends or are they like sour dough starters that get passed around and shared among other brewers.
So you can buy a pack man yea, yeah, you can actually by the use that we use from the majority of our beers and use it in homebrew. Yeah, but it is like something that we definitely use others. I think Beard was the only one that was proprietary. We don't do that here, but a lot of brewers will, and they will make their own yeast and keep it completely in house. They'll go from frozen culture all the way to pitch and use that and never have to buy yeast from anywhere else.
So remember to pitch just means to add yeast. So many terms. But now you can throw them around like you know what they mean. Old word over here will not blow your cover. Sarah Michelle Welch wants to know why do beers have different percentages of alcoholics them different styles.
It's appropriate and they will match better with the flavor profile the balance of it. So some will have a little bit more malt and that can handle a little more alcohol, or a little more sugar that can handle more alcohol. It does change up the mouthfeel as well.
And then so mouthfeel is the viscosity and bubble pain is the carbonation. Yeah, these are good terms. Any other weird terms I should know about?
Oh see, uh drinkability?
What the hell does that mean?
Exactly? So that's why I had to take it off the century for him, because everyone kept like, well, yeah, I could pound six of these. That's not what that means.
So drinkability does not mean pound ability, but rather what is the arc of the beer when you first first take a sip and then when it warms up a little on your tongue, and then the lingering aftertaste and is it all good? Great? That's drinkability. Also, while editing this, I started to imagine that Quentin was a muppet. I think his voice lends itself well to muppetness. Just picture it. He has a high degree of listenability. When you're having to test beers for your job, are you spitting them?
Or are you getting hammered at two in the afternoon for well.
Good call on the time. That's actually when we do it. No, we only give two ounces and six samples. That eight samples at max. So okay, at most you've got ten ounces and you're not getting hammered. Okay, No, he walks around here annihilated afterwards. And there's always pitcups. You always have to give spitcups, just in case, just in.
Case someone wants to, just in case it seems insulting. Stephan Titus wants to know how do you keep your records organized? And are you a naturally organized person? We did talk about your cleanliness, but how do you do you have log books happening? So how do you keep track a millions of yeast pets or I guess livestock if you want to look at them that way?
Yeah, no, So it's it depends on every company, does it a little different. We're still on the Excel paper, okay, and we definitely want to get away from that as soon as possible, because it is the kind of a nightmare of this Sixcel file labeled this and yeah, yeah, I mean Excel is great for what it does. It's not a good database. Yeah, it can't handle a lot of data.
But database is on your Christmas list.
Lab Information management system is on my wish list.
Caitlin Plate wants to know our food scientists common to fine working in breweries or is it still overrun by a lot of engineers. She's a future food scientist who would love a job at a brewery fishing smiley face. You know.
Actually there's more and more universities actually coming out with specific brewing programs. Oh yeah. When I was going to undergrad, I really wasn't thinking of brewing right off the gate. I was thinking of med school. And then I realized I didn't like people that much. And then I was like, all right, what am I going to do with a microbiology degree? And so he hopped into food science because I just you could be an ice cream scientist. Come on,
you can do that. Hell's yeah, somebody's got to do that. Actually, ice cream is really complex as a food base. It is a good jack of all trades degree is to do food science. You've got physics, microbiology, chemistry, and just and a lot of sensory so you can kind of walk in anywhere.
Oh, this is a good question about selecting a beer. Becca wants to know. With a vast number of beers these days, how do I navigate them all? My BF either best friend or boyfriend and I were talking last night and he said there are too many beers, so much is good that nothing is standing out anymore. So how does one make choices in this oversaturated market of local breweries and limited editions, too much of a good things? What's to be done?
Pick a brewery? Just stick there? Yeah, road has everything you need.
Kidding aside, both Jake and Quenton essentially say try to fund the local guys. That's one angle. Two more questions, what do you hate about your job or your life or brewing or yeast? Or is there a certain moment or is there a thing your fuck this?
Yeah, there's one moment every damn morning when I show up and I have to open the incubator and look at those peta dishes? We got anything?
Yeah? Yeah?
And I hope not. I mean it really Basically the way I set up the quality program, it's if something grows, it probably shouldn't have been there unless it was the yeast we were looking for. And that's when we were making the beard yeast or a beard beer. That bastard it was technically a wild yeast, and so it was resistant to all the plates I would put it on. If I didn't know exactly what it looked like, that
crusty little bastard. Huh, I would have a freak out and like a condition fit, Like we've got a wild east and it's gone through the package line, and oh my god, every gas getting the building's gonna have to be completely replaced, and we're gonna be shut down for weeks. And I'd have that little moment. By the time something can grow on a Petter dish, it could be in North Carolina.
So for quality control, which is a huge part of Quentin's job, he has to keep reference samples of every batch that goes into a bottle or can so he can verify in case they do have an issue with one. So they have an area of the brewery that's like a library of beers, and they have samples of a bunch of recent bruise in the lab. So when you open up that thing, you're just hoping it's just like anxiety.
Yeah, I don't want to smell anything funky, that's for damn sure.
One of the things that might be funky is something called for ethyl phenol, which is created by a spoilage yeast.
Was that not like poop?
Okay?
Yeah, it's like straight poop.
There's so many reasons why you don't want to smell that.
In the more baby Vomit or partannamizes it is a really really one because it's just a bugger to get rid of it. If we ever at it. It's horse blanket and band aid and barnyard. Oh yeah, it's a whole bunch of bad and it has shut down wineries. So, I mean, there's a hit list of crap I don't want to ever see in this That's one of them that's on my shit list.
What's the best part of your.
Job the complete randomness of the day. Well, I mean, I've got it structured, so when it is danned out like that's really really awesome. But I never know what new project can throw at me. So I got pulled in all sorts of different directions, and I kind of have to be the master of all.
Ground here, so I think what I'm trying to say that he likes the variety, even though it's part I asked the Level ten Spirits wizard Jake Coleshue, and he said that the coolest thing about being a distiller is when he hosts a cocktail event or a whiskey release and he gets to see a whole room of people enjoying themselves as part of the fruit of his labor. I guess the spoiled fruits of his labor put in a good way. He says, that's more rewarding for me
than drinking himself. Although Jake also referenced that meme this is what my friends think I do, this is what my parents think I do. This is what I actually do, and he says what he actually does is clean. Says, whenever you look at brewing or distilling, controlling yeast and bacterial growth is so important that brewers are almost just
glorified dishwashers. I'm going to quote him directly. He said, I mean, we just clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, sanitize, clean, and then we clean, then we sanitize and clean, and then we sanitize. Quentin of course echoed this fact of zymology.
So like, I don't know if you're ware of this, but ninety percent of a brewer's job is cleaning stuff. I just heard that is totally true. Uh, Industry wide turnover is pretty high because everyone's like, I'm gonna work at a brewery and I'm gonna make beer. So I mean, somebody's got clean those kegs, somebody's gonna make the cardboard box,
and otherwise the whole thing collapses. And so you can never complain about working too hard because somebody else is doing another really hard job, especially around here, because yeah, you are cleaning stuff, you're removing stuff, you're lifting kegs.
You're not just kicking back on a porch drinking beer all day. If you had any advice for someone who wants to be a professional brewer or professional food scientist in general, what's the most important piece, and then I'll let you go, since I've been asking you a one million.
Questions last week, I was here fifteen hours on Friday. Don't worry about it is get into a lab or get into whatever you think you're going to do as soon as possible. Find out what your passionate is get involved as soon as possible.
Will you ever call yourself a zymologist? I think you should start.
I don't know.
I love that you can call yourself the minister of truth or a wizard, but a zimologist is a stretch.
I don't know.
Well, you're the most knowledgeable zimologist I've ever met. So cheered to that. Thank you so much.
For being no, no, no, I'm glad we can turn out cheers to yees yeah, absolutely and everything else in there, don't say that.
To see photos of me and Quentin's Sturgeon, you can head to my Instagram at ologies. The podcast is also on Twitter at ologies and I'm on both as Ali Ward with one L. Thank you so much to Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch again for hooking this interview up and driving me to Newport and hanging out and getting Dutch Brothers coffee and burgers. And to Jakolshu and Quentin Sturgeon for the fungus chats and the really memorable We'll Never Forget tour. Thank you also to everyone for supporting
on Patreon again. It's an independent podcast and you can become a patron for as little as twenty five cents an episode, and you can have your questions asked to theologists. You can also support the podcast by getting yourself some ologies merch, like some awesome shirts and hats and toats and pins. That's at ologiesmerch dot com. You can join
up with other ologites in the Facebook group. Thank you to Ernie for admitting, and thank you as always to Stephen Ray Morris for doing a bang up job editing. As I record these asides several days later than usual because I was traveling for a family emergency. My folks were stuck in a bit of a blizzard up north and I got hella behind. Thank you again so much for listening. If you like the podcast, you can always support for free by rating and reviewing on iTunes. That
helps so much. And as a thank you for sticking it through to the credits, I usually reward you with one heinous secret for my life, and I'm going to tell you too. Number one, I love eating smoked oysters
from a can. I think they're good. I love them in two the last few houses and apartments I've lived in, I've written notes, and I've tucked them into hidden places, and I always wonder when someone will find them, And I hope at least like a decade goes by, because if you find like a two month old, wistful farewell note, it's this kind of embarrassing, like if you're pulling away the moving truck and like the new tenant. Fine, it's this like it's the year twenty eighteen and I used
to live here. Note like with still wet ink tucked behind a cupboard. That's just embarrassing. But I do wonder if anyone's found any of the notes I've hidden in any of the apartments or houses I lived in. And I also wonder if there are any notes lurking behind any weird floorboards around me right now? Isn't that weird?
Have you ever done that? Anyway? And this is now twenty twenty two to me, I'm just popping back in to say thank you for listening to these encores as I grieve and get through a funeral planning for my dad, who once building us a house when we lived in Tahoe, wrote a note that he hid on a board in a wall. And in twenty nineteen, my sister Janelle happened
to take a day trip. Happened to see that they were remodeling that house, and happened to talk to the owner outside who had found the board like a week or so before and saved it. So he gave her the board, and for my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary in twenty nineteen, my sister gifted them that like a time capsule from their past, and we all freaked out and
we cried a lot. And my parents were actually building a small cottage in my sister's yard to live out their their final days this past few months, and it's due to be finished in a few weeks. And my dad's goal was to sit on the deck and drink a glass of wine before he passed away, and he almost made it. But we're going to be hanging that board that my sister found somewhere in the cottage. So I guess I got a thing for hanging notes or
hiding notes in places. Thank you all so much for their critter picks for Grandpad's and I hope you're out there having a tiny ice cream and enjoying the day. Okay, bye bye, okay bye bye.
Pacaderman College Hommeology, crypto Zoology, lithology, and Mathnology meteorology, pathology, apology, ceriology, elinology.
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