You're on the bus an hour from home and bumper to bumper traffic creeping forward a few inches at a time. Someone's kids are screaming, and suddenly your back is too. Luckily, Panadal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they get to work in as little as ten minutes for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for panadal speed based on absorption data. Contains paracetamol. Always read the label or leaflet.
Oh hey, 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 yeasty? 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 queens 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 Lease 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 Zimology. So the word 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 holler 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 blitzed or 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.
No, it's not tell me what your title 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 truth, 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 project that includes everything from sensory to microbiology. A lot of biochemistry at a resurrect and old HPOC. What's an HPC, 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 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 ten 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 intro. You seeing a little tiny single cell critter.
Yep one sold little fun guy Sacrimices, and we'd like to use sacramice the service 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 takes ger old juice and you dump in the exact 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 U 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 already? It depends on how lax the panel would be. Okay, but yeah, I mean everything from rotten cabbage sewerdrade and oh yeah, since your terms get fun? Yeah, and how do you how do baby vomit?
Is one that baby vomit? 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 eve. Unless you can relate it 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, isopleuric acid? Oh?
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 look up and smell is linked 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. And 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 sensory and then trying to make sure we don't kill anybody by making beer or exploading 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. That's good.
Can you walk me 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 germinating it 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
cool 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 we 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 soon super common to Quentin in the way that as a Northern California native. 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 centerfuge, yeah, to just get rid of it and 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 centerfuge, 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 YaST 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 it 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 workhorse of a yeast. It 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 phenolics, more band aid, and 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 beer 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 sacha my servisier, 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, she was
working in New York. I sent that to her as a care package and she 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 her 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 east 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, So that's two things aside. Number one, I'm going to college, that's not an option to not and I was gonna pay for so all right, cool eleven year old wax across the street starts a moment long, 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 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 that wasn't fun. She hanon 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 a not a big drinker.
When she does, it's some more of the sour tart stuff, which I mean, she can peel and eat a lemon, but I know that's the face silet make when she does it. It's like it's unbelievable. 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 tull?
Okay?
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Okay, You're on the bus an hour from home and bumper to bumper traffic creeping forward a few inches at a time, someone's kids are screaming and suddenly your back is too. Luckily, Panadal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they get to work in as little as ten minutes for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for panadal speed based on absorption data contains paracetamol. Always read the label or leaflet.
Your questions. This is a rapid fire around. Greg wants to know any secret ease that might make for better fermenting peers.
Try everything you can from where you can get it. There's a lot at places at homebrew stores that Or try culturing your own and see what's growing out in it. Yeah, I see what happens. What's the worst. You just make a terrible batch of beer and then you tump it, clean everything and start over.
Well, how do you know that you even have use? You put the wart out and see what happens.
Well there, I mean a couple of steps so 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. Whoa, Yeah, I mean you just need a couple of glass where and you just make a small little batch of warp, 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 and 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 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 LULUs 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 spoilage. 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. 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 e. Is my beer health food?
There was a guy who lived off nothing but guinness for a month and it's totally doable. Yeah, especially unfiltered because you have the pro and prebaticts of yeast. Okay, so yeah, I mean you people have done it. It's got a ton of nutrients in there. It's golly 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, Like, and you're on a juice diet. You're not getting a lot of fiber that way. It was all pure liquid.
So who was this guy? Was this someone you knew?
Or was this This is not Larry from my freshman year. I had heard this and this is like, I don't know, it's 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 gloric needs met. This was calculated by a one hundred and seventy pound
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 have 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, but 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 between it light and beer, right, you're trying to get those carves out. It's just a matter of what you use or your sugar sores and what's going to be left over. The yeast is not going to consume, and so it's one of those factors. If you want to have less carbs in your beer, you've got to use the yastrain 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 cars.
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 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 Lte 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 lob ultras Like if you like CrossFit and beer're like okay, it's like no.
I'm sorry those you don't exist.
Brittany Chrissa 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 fermentation 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 so all that foam breaks off or just stays in the vessel, or had as much yeast, or keep it in a bathtub with some ice chill it down, because I mean during the 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 first, going back to the tips for Homer, sanitation gotta 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, and 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 and amino acids, and they're going to go crazy. And so that's why sack mice ser basically started to use. Because it's such an active fermenter. 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 ancetobacter aceta bactery makes acetic acid, which is vinegar, or like lactic acid bacteria or Pediacoccus which makes lactic acid. It's not as tart, but it's still a will ruin a beer and it's like sour milk is.
Pedia Coccus, pediacoccus, my shitless. Yeah, are you clean at home? Are you a neat freak at home? Are you like not?
No? Like, the worst is the kitchen sink, and my wife will rip, she does totally rip me. Anyone is the dirtiest place in your house?
Oh? Say it isn't so no, okay, So I have often heard and feared this about kitchen sinks, and I had to look it up. Well. 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 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 and she's 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?
Uh.
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 Interobacter.
Equal 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 a little tiny, single self.
But I don't know. I have heard 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 I have on the brewing industry?
There certainly was I think was it Yakamaara 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, or night everyone's scrambling and host umm. Yeah, so that immediately bumps 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 Yakima. 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 you're throwing in like rice rup 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 going to 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 labels 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 barley 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, barreley wine.
We did a flight of barley wine or old Krusty. I think the oldest bottle we opened was twenty years old and we jumped every four years. So good, okay, 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 shatter that bottle. 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, yeah, 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. 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. So 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 risky because you don't know what you ain't get, and you're also going to get a lot of backteria.
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 market and people liked it, saying it had a sweet, bready, 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 culture and that way you can't really screw it up. Okay, you can stress 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 formation.
Okay, Yeah.
Carrie Steward wants to know to craft brewers maintain their own hops and yeast strains like proprietary blends or are they like sourdough starters that get passed around and shared among other brewers.
So you can buy a pack man, Yeah, you can actually go buy 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 breweris 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. Just 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, will profile the balance of it. So some will have a little bit more molt 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 drinkability, What the hell does that mean? Exactly? See, that's why I had to take it off the century for them 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 after taste and is it all good? Great? That's drink ability. Also, while editing this, I started to imagine that Quentin was a muppet. I think his voice learns 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 among eight samples at max. So okay, at most you've got ten ounces and you're not getting hammered. Okay, No, I mean nobody walks around here annihilated afterwards. I And there's always pitcups. We 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? It's happening, So how do you keep track of millions of yeast pets or guess livestock if you want to look at them that way?
Yeah? No, so 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 kind of a nightmare of this Sixcel file labeled this and YadA yah. 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 find 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. University is 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 I 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, microbreweries and limited editions? Too much of a good thing? What's to be done?
Pick a brewery? Just stick there? Yeah, rogue has everything you need.
Kidding aside, both Jake and Quentin 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 peacher dishes. We got anything?
Yeah?
Yeah, 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 beard beer. That bastard it was technically a wild East, 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 uh, 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 get in the building is 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 I something grow on a Peter 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 you 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 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 britannamices, it is a really, really bad one because it's just a bugger to get rid of it. If we ever had 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 brewery. 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 daned 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 Holshu, 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 fruits of his labor, or 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 that 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 aware of, but ninety percent of a brewer's job is cleaning stuff.
I just heard.
That is totally true. Uh, industry wide turnovers 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 to 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 moving 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 rational food scientist in general, what's the most important piece?
And then I'll let you go.
Since seven as 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 passion 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 on. No, no, no, I'm glad we can turn out cheers to yeast.
Yeah, absolutely and everything else in there.
Don't say that. To see photos of me and Quentin 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 and to Jakoleshue 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. Plus you can see more photos from the rogue tour, and I put up videos every once in a while to say hi. You can also support the podcast by getting yourself some Ologies merch, like some awesome shirts and hats and toads and pins. That's at ologiesmerch dot com. You can join up with other ologites in
the Facebook group. Thank you to Ernie and Hannah 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, and always support for free by rating and
reviewing on iTunes. That helps so much. And please do remember just ask smart people downb questions, you guys, because if you're curious, it's never a dumb question, and someone else is probably wondering the exact same thing, and it's like, oh, I'm so glad you asked uh. 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. And 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 finds 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've lived in. And I also wonder if there are any notes lurking behind any weird floorboards around me right now, within that weird Have you ever done that anyway? Okay, bye bye pacadermatology, hombiology, cryptozoology, lithologynology, meteorology and pology, ethology, zeriology, elithology,