Wild yeast

Not deliberately...

Pretty disgusting!

You'll find that very few wild yeasts make a palatable beer. By all means, go ahead and try it, but typically you wind up with something unpleasantly phenolic that is best used as slug bait.

The wild yeasts predominant in my area produce a very funky, unpleasant clove-like character with a sourness that is not clean. Nothing like a pleasant Belgian yeast strain or yeast/bacterial fermentation common to some belgian ales.

This is in contrast to wild yeast fermentation of apples for cider - for some reason that works quite nicely here.

I've had some experiments from a local micro that have used "cultivated" wild yeast. They have a staff microbiologist who cultivated 7 wild yeast isolates from wild raspberries growing in Cheyenne Canyon Colorado. They didn't ferment out their beers with the yeast but rather innoculated finished conventional beers with honey and the wild yeast isolates.

The results have been good to phenominal IMO. At the merely good side the beers have been slightly lactic but rather one-dimensional and sometimes "Orvallish". On the phenominal side they made a "sour wheat" that went through the entire sweet-tart profile I haven't tasted the like of since I had Cantillon Iris on tap.

_Randal

Pretty interesting - I do know a mycologist who works in a related are of research as I do who isolated strains of "blue stain fungi" associated with bark beetles (don't ask) and made experimental beers with them.

I didn't get a chance to taste any of them, but I was told that some, at least, turned out quite well.

Note that this is *very* different than simply exposing wort to atmospheric critters (where I suspect you get a yeast/bacteria mix).

So did he innoculate finished beer, or use it for the entire fermentation? And what did he call it? Bug Fungus Ale?

_Randal

These fungi are actually very closely related to brewing yeast: typically there will be complexes of six or seven strains associated with a single bark beetle. In this case the fungi were taken from mounain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae).

You didn't want to know this I'm sure, but the fungi have symbiotic relationship with the beetles, blocking a tree's resin defense and allowing the beetle access to trees that it normally couldn't overcome.

They are called blue stain fungi because the end result of attack is a bluish stain on the wood of killed trees.

What this researcher did was isolate pure strains from the beetle - I think 6 in total. These were cultured and pilot brews were made from each one. As I understand, several produced awful beers, but at least one strain produced a nice beer.

I'm not sure how much she brewed, but a reportedly decent APA style beer was made and sold at an auction at an Entomology conference. I know the person who won the auction, but she lives quite a distance from me and I never got a chance to taste the beer. It was called Mountain Pine Beetle Ale.

Personally I would have probably called it Romulan Blue Ale (in reference to the 'blue stain' fungi), but I'm more of a techie than a bug guy.

I am currently using wild yeast to ferment an 'elderflower champagne'. It relies on wild yeasts living on the elderflowers.