FEATURE

BY ALESZU BAJAK

YEAST

Ranching
WRANGLING WILD YEAST AND OTHER

MICROORGANISMS, OFF THE GRID

46 Beeradvocate

Photo by Michael Donk

A yeast grows in Brooklyn. Several strains of wild yeast,

actually. At home in his DIY laboratory in Sheepshead Bay in south Brooklyn, Dmitri Serjanov
isolates yeasts from bottles of Belgian beers like Cantillon and Saison Dupont. After drinking the beer down to the dregs, he pours the yeast out, grows a colony on petridishes
and inoculates a small amount of low-specific-gravity wort. He then offers his stockpiled yeast to brewers on the internetSerjanovs online handle is BKYeastin
exchange for other beers and yeasts, or for $10 to cover shipping.
Tucked into a corner of his small apartment, Serjanovs lab consists of a bookcase
lined with beakers, test tubes and erlenmeyer flasks, and a desk that holds a
microscope connected to his computer. He installed a mini-hood and encased the
area with fiberglass to keep it sterile. The squat refrigerator nearby is actually an
incubator kept at 86 Fahrenheit, optimal growing conditions for yeast. He also has
a narrow workspace for pipetting, stirring and mixing, and spreading yeast colonies
on petridishes. When his work is done and its lights out, an eerie ultraviolet light
stays on, keeping his shelf sterile.
Though his day job is as a molecular biologist at a local medical school, Serjanov is a selfproclaimed yeast rancher. And the yeast hes wrangling in his laboratorywhich is undeniably
better outfitted than those at most microbreweriesreflects a larger trend. In their quest to
push the boundaries of brewing and redefine craft beer styles, American brewers are deep into
experimenting with brewings most fickle ingredient: wild yeast.
Prized for the nuances the yeast imparts on beerwhich include earthiness, spiciness and that
inscrutable barnyard characterBrettanomyces is the most popular of the wild yeast once
only seen in Belgian Lambic beers that were fermented by throwing open the brewery doors
rather than throwing in a yeast slurry. And as demand for Brett and other wild strains skyrockets,
geeks like Serjanov are stepping up to meet it.

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47

Bottom left: Oxbows

Tim Adams filling barrels.
Above right: Many of the
beers aging in Anchorage
Brewings barrels have
been inoculated with
wild yeast.

48 Beeradvocate

Leading the Brett charge are artisanal American

breweries like Crooked Stave in Colorado, Maines
Allagash and Oxbow breweries, Anchorage Brewing
in Alaska, and Californias Russian River and The
Bruery. Theyve developed innovative recipes, added
specialty ingredients like hibiscus and rye, and
inoculated with strains of Brettanomyces. Using
Lactobacillus and Pediococcus bacteria that give off
lactic acid, a souring agent, theyve also riffed on
European sour styles, like tart, light-bodied Berliner
Weisses and sour, malty Flanders Browns.
Once I started experimenting with
Brettanomyces, I fell in love with it, says Gabe
Fletcher, owner and head brewer of Anchorage
Brewing Company in Alaska. He uses Brett in almost
every beer he makes, and most of those sit around
aging in barrels for six months to a year. Its really
an amazing yeast once you embrace what it can do
and give it its time.
Fletcher praises Bretts ability to scavenge for

oxygen in his hoppy beers, a characteristic that

keeps beers like Galaxy and Bitter Monk fresh after a
year or more.
While Fletcher sources from yeast banks in the
lower 48, and from his growing culture of bacteria
and wild yeast donated by Russian River, some pro
brewers are reaching out to hobbyists like Serjanov.
Sometimes they just hear about it and want to
give it a try, sometimes they have tasted homebrew
made with it and liked it well enough to want to
do it themselves, Serjanov says. As far as I know,
there are commercial batches already bubbling
away in some places with yeast I isolated from
Cantillon bottles.
As many professional brewers know, homebrewers
offer a wealth of hair-brained ideas that wouldnt
be worth researching or developing at a commercial
brewery. Which is why if youre looking for people
isolating and brewing with wild yeasts and bacteria,
you neednt look any further than the homebrewing
community.

Photo credits clockwise from top left: Michael Donk, courtesy Oxbow Brewing, Taylor Seidler

GO BRETT OR GO HOME
Top left: The Bruerys
yeast propagator.

YEAST TRAPS

When Jeff Mello goes on vacation, his packing list always includes an agar plate,
sterile cotton swabs and a test tube; the mason jars of unfermented wort that he
uses at home dont travel so well. He leaves the yeast traps outside to collect
anything floating around the garden. Like a wines terroir, Mello wants to find
strains that are specific to a certain place. He recently dubbed a species of yeast
he found and isolated from his own backyard Saccharomyces arlingtonesis,
after his hometown, Arlington, Va.
Mello calls his open-source yeast project Bootleg Biology, and though he has
no formal science training, hes learned to make his own petridishes and identify
ale yeast colonies by sight, and hes tweaking a growing medium that will only
host Brettanomyces (adding lactose to the agar has produced mixed results, but
hes got more promising agar media in the works).
Crooked Stave and Russian River are putting out beautiful beers that are in high
demand, says Mello, who recently left the nonprofit world to work on Bootleg
Biology and in a craft beer shop. Why not harvest your own funky strain?
Homebrewing first piqued Mellos interest in the hobby; then he read Yeast,
Jamil Zainasheff andChris Whites tome on the subject. He says the section on
building your own yeast lab is probably aimed at scientists with large-scale aspirationsand while commercial yeast labs are great, Mello says, I also wanted to
do something a little more holistic. So in addition to isolating local yeast, the goal
of Bootleg Biology is alsoto create the most diverse library of brewing microbes
and cultures possible. That means allcultures are sourced and isolated exclusively
from bootleg sources like the air, kombucha, yogurt, honey, fruit and whatever
else we can get our hands on. Some are isolated, but many remain as a blend or
mix of cultures that can be brewed with directly.
Eventually, Mello will sell and trade his cultures online, but for now, hes handing out samples to adventurous souls at events and homebrew club meetings.
In return, he asks that brewers send him their fermentation metrics. The goal
for the near future is to build a solid database that aggregates that data, with
analytics for each strain displayed onbootlegbiology.com.
That kind of precision and documentation is important, says Ben Woodward.
Woodward is isolating his own cultures in Saxapahaw, a small town smack dab in
the center of North Carolina. He and his wife, Dawnya, are months away from opening up Haw River Farmhouse Ales, a 10-barrel brewery that will feature local yeast.
Last February, Woodward set out a few yeast traps covered in cheesecloth
around town. After harvesting three samples that smelled promising and wondering how he was going to brew with them, he was approached while he was
pouring at a beer festival.
Deborah Springer, a postdoctoral associate at Duke University Department of
Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, had read our blog post and offered to help
clean up our samples, isolate the yeast cells and run DNA sequencing on them
to help organize our efforts, says Woodward. The bug turned out to be a strain
of Pichia fermentans yeast, which shows up about a year into Belgian Lambic
fermentations. Woodward hopes to use it commercially as the primary yeast for
his year-round Belgian Blonde.

Jeff Mello captures

yeast samples from
hand-picked fruit.

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Yeast is one of the last unexplored ways of

brewers giving their own spin on recipes, he says,
citing Mystic Brewery (in Massachusetts), Jester
King (Texas), Jolly Pumpkin (Michigan) and Odell
(Colorado) as examples.
Woodward is about to start working with the vineyard across the Haw River to isolate a strain of Brett
from its grapes to use in the secondary fermentation
of an upcoming brew. That way, we could ferment
with a truly Saxapahaw Brett, Woodward says.

SAFETY FIRST
There are a lot of characteristics that are very specific to Brett, says Neva Parker,
head of laboratory operations at White Labs, a leading retailer of brewing yeasts in
San Diego, Calif. Parker has spent a lot of time raising Brett, and identifying whether
samples sent in by brewers are yeast or bacteria.
Brett are very high acid producers for a wild yeast, so we grow them on a [medium]
that has an alkaline buffer, explains Parker.
Her plates have calcium carbonate embedded in them; she offers up Tums as a
ubiquitous substitute. If they are Brett or a Brett-like species, they will produce a lot
of acid clearing. In other words, when the Brett colonies grown on top of a cloudy,
gelatin-like agar, a smooth, clear halo will form around the colonies, becauseif you
remember your Chemistry 101an acid (the Brett metabolism) and a base (the calcium carbonate) neutralize each other.
Parker stresses that harvesting wild organisms can be risky for novices. If fermentation doesnt happen, then the beverage isnt safe to drink, because you could be
capturing something that is potentially pathogenic, she says. Ethanol and low pH
are key to keeping out the bad bugs.
She suggests that DIY yeast ranchers should have a strong background in microbiology and yeast culturing; start by getting familiar with culturing and maintaining
brewers yeast, then apply these techniques and foundation to culturing other organisms, she says.
If the yeast sample does ferment, then youre not going to die, she laughs. With
fermentation, the pH drops, and you get alcohol made. The organisms that are going to
survive that are not going to hurt you. But stillbe careful out there.

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Charlotesville, Va., brewer Hunter Smith thinks of Brett

in its historical context. With the rise in popularity
of Brett, the owner of Champion Brewing thinks its
funny that brewers and winemakers used to be so preoccupied with eliminating it from their barrels. In fact,
hes watched as his father and the staff have worked
tirelessly to stave off Brett infections at his parents
vineyard in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. Now, he
purposefully inoculates their old barrels.
Ive got a beer going in the barrel now, points
out Smith. Its a 9-percent American Pale Sour being
aged in Afton Mountain Chardonnay barrels with
Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. One
winemakers Brett barrel is another brewers treasure.
The breweries of old most likely had barrels rife
with souring bacteria or Brettanomyces-esque
bugs, whether by design or not. In fact, people who
have plumbed historical accounts of 19th-century
Porterswhich were aged in wooden barrelshave
found mentions of sour, tart and astringent,
which leads them to believe that the barrels Porters
were once-upon-a-time aged in were also home to
bacteria and wild yeast.
While some attempts at homegrown yeast might
end up in the compost bin, Fletcher of Anchorage
Brewing says that the successes are worth the trouble.
I have done wild fermentation before with great
results. Ive also had not so good results, he says.
But thats the chance you take
when dealing with wild yeasts.
Aleszu Bajak
Thats why they are called wild
is a former lab
rat turned
you dont always know what the
science writer
result will be, but you wont know
currently into
unless you try.
Rye IPAs. Follow

@aleszubajak on
Twitter.

Photo by Michael Donk

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