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#007 Wild Yeast - Catching, Wrangling & Expectations With Jason
847 Plays4 years ago
There is always a little mysticism and romance when it comes to discussing wild yeast. Jason is here to help us fall more deeply in love with it & teach us how to catch it. Don't be fooled. Wild yeast is unpredictable! It could help you make the best beverage you ever, it could be destined for the drain.
Jason is a professional, production brewer at Brew Union in Palmerston North New Zealand. In his spare time, he has a passion for weird and wonderful fermentation. Find Brew Union Here: https://www.brewunion.co.nz/ Find Manawabrew Here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsE7PIsLv2Vkj2IM7VCilBQ
Support Chase The Craft: https://chasethecraft.com/support
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Transcript
Introduction and Support
00:00:00
Speaker
this podcast is brought to you by the patreons that make it all possible the patreons are the people that support me each and every month that allow me to keep on doing what i do and to bring you more and more content so thank you so much patreons
00:00:14
Speaker
If you're finding value in these podcasts and you'd like to help support them or the videos, please jump on over to chasethecraft.com and go to the support page. There's a whole lot of ideas there on how you can directly help still it and chase the craft. Help me make this thing bigger, better, and bring more content to you more regularly.
00:00:33
Speaker
This podcast is also brought to you by Gladfield, they're making a sweet kickass craft malt right down here in New Zealand and they've been helping me out a whole lot, especially during this Covid lockdown situation.
Meet the Brewer: Passion for Wild Yeast
00:00:46
Speaker
My guest today is just an awesome human being. He's kind, he's outgoing, he's friendly and he loves helping people.
00:00:52
Speaker
He's also a kick-ass commercial brewer, an award-winning commercial brewer actually, but he has another side to him. He loves messing around with wild yeast in his spare time and he's done some crazy things. So we're gonna talk all things yeast today. Now, here's the
Recording Mishap Story
00:01:08
Speaker
thing guys. I may or may not have got about two hours worth of content from Jason before I realized I didn't hit the record button.
00:01:15
Speaker
We've been drinking for the first podcast and we had to start all over again, another couple of hours. So, this one's definitely a little looser. If you're worried about hearing swear words, don't listen to this podcast.
00:01:35
Speaker
All right, guys, so we are live again with Jason because we just had a really cool conversation for what I'm thinking probably at least an hour, dude. Yeah. And then what happened, Jason? You forgot to push record, mate. So those youngs, whilst they were epic, were not recorded. So here we are. I'm probably about three and a half.
00:02:05
Speaker
We'll just, we'll just go for it and see what happens. I think we, I think we should do so. I am. I'm really glad that I've got more of this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we started the first podcast, which no one will ever hear. Um, with me drinking some of the swamp juice, like I said last time, tell the people what this
Creating 'Swamp Juice' Hazy IPA
00:02:27
Speaker
is. Well, I put it in my mouth because I really want more of it. Sweet. Uh, so some juice is a,
00:02:35
Speaker
a hazy IPA style of beer. I call it a hazy IPA versus a New England IPA because I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to beer styles. I like to have a bit of bitterness in my beer. So that is version six, I believe that you have there. Yeah, so swamp juice is a beer where my creative juices are allowed to flow. So where I currently work is a production brewery.
00:03:04
Speaker
our brew pub. So we basically try and keep production at a level where we don't run out of our core range of beers and some juices one where I'm able to throw my creative juices at and play with different hops. So the malt base stays exactly the same. We don't change it at all. The yeast stays the same. So it's just Saffale SO4.
00:03:29
Speaker
for those that wanted to know what yeast we use. We don't use any fog yeast at all. We don't use the traditional hazy yeast. We just use dirty old SO4 and it seems to be working pretty well. Let me stop you right there, Jason. Cause last time we recorded this, you said a proprietary yeast. So the key here is that I had to get you a little drunk. Is that what you're saying? Pretty much. Yeah. Okay, cool. Give me a drunk hang on me.
00:03:59
Speaker
To be fair, man, I don't know what you're doing with it, but this is not hitting me over the head with ESO4. So I think the fact that people know what you're using.
00:04:10
Speaker
It's that old adage, right? You can give people the recipe, but it almost doesn't matter because it's not, it's not the numbers. It's not the specific ingredients. It's the care. It's the attention to detail. It's the process that. If I was to give you that recipe and you bring it at home, your water is going to be different for a start. Your kettle is going to produce different hop utilizations. And we do, uh, but that one there features New Zealand and American hops, uh, predominantly in New Zealand. So one of them is called Mochiweka.
00:04:37
Speaker
The other one's called Tahiki, and the American hop is from the Ukema Valley called Laurel. So when I initially came up with a pilot for that, I really wanted to showcase New Zealand hops, but I just felt that I couldn't marry Machuweaker and Tahiki together as well as I could with another New Zealand hop. So through Laurel in there instead. And so you mentioned that the Laurel gives a rosehip.
00:05:07
Speaker
aroma to this beforehand. Yeah, Rosa poor rose water. So Turkish delight, basically, but without the chocolate. So
00:05:15
Speaker
it's quite subtle and it does it will pick up the more that that banana ester disappears from the English yeast so it is so drinkable dude it is so drinkable and it's drinkable because it is you use the word pillowy earlier on backstage and i love that it's pillowy it's soft it's juicy um juicy almost means nothing now because everyone just that's the word everyone throws around but
00:05:40
Speaker
It's true. If you blindfolded someone and told them that you had made them a cocktail with a nondescript alcohol, like a nondescript tropical juice, and something spritzy with, actually maybe I guess tonic to give the bitterness to it. They would 100% believe you, right? That's what it tastes like. It's crazy. Thanks, man. Yeah, really happy. So 6.5%.
00:06:09
Speaker
It's got a little bit of a hum to it, but nothing like you boys are used to making. Well, we're not used to drinking it like this either, man. I will very, very often, I had this discussion with the last guy that was a guest on the podcast. When you pull me a whiskey, and I know you enjoy a single bottle too, so I'm interested to see what you think about this. If you pull me a dram, if you pull me a double,
00:06:37
Speaker
I'll happily sit there and nurse it for half an hour, 45 minutes and just take a little sip and have some water and, you know, have a yarn, have a talk. And it's always there. I'm always grabbing it and I'm always tasting it, but it's almost like the lingering flavor in my mouth is almost as good as the beverage itself. I put it in my mouth. I swallow and I just want to guzzle more of it. It's freaking dangerous, dude. So yeah, no, so I like, I like to do the same with the drink.
00:07:07
Speaker
I
Craft Brewing Community and Brew Union
00:07:08
Speaker
like to let it open up. It's probably more of a wine term, but just sitting in that bouquet opened a bit more when it's had a bit of oxygen in it. And depending on how strong it is, I might even throw a bit of water in there. Yeah, I feel you too. Yeah, it's an experience, not a beverage, right?
00:07:29
Speaker
Absolutely. There's something, there's something about whiskey, especially, and I hate to sound like a snobby prick, but there's especially something about single malt that just turns up into- Snobby prick. Yeah, I know. As soon as we realized that we were going to record this again, we instantly said it's going to be like last time, but more fun and more swearing. Yeah. So, you know, you call me a snobby prick. I apologize for my state of mouth. I'm a tradie somewhere.
00:08:01
Speaker
We've got plenty of room to go from a snobby prick, I think. We're going to get worse than that.
00:08:08
Speaker
But yeah, dude, it's great. And we talked about that rosehip flavor and aroma, actually, almost acting like the backbone of the soup, like a stock or a umami flavor or an MSG almost in something. Not that it is savory. Yeah, not that it actually tastes like that at all. But yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a binder. It's the backbone. It's the thing that pulls everything else together and gives everything enough
00:08:36
Speaker
Body's not quite the right word, but it gives everything else enough structure, I guess, to... Couldn't think of that one before, could we? Oh yeah, I know, yeah. It's the lack of swamp juice that...
00:08:51
Speaker
I am so out of touch in the beer world, dude. Do you want to give me some other kind of tasting notes on what the... I don't know any of these hops. It's so far behind. So Mochaweka is a Saza type hop. So its lineage goes back to Czech Republic, where Saza is from. Mochaweka I really, really like. I really enjoy the mojito flavors that you can get from it.
00:09:20
Speaker
And this particular beer that you're drinking at the minute, there is a little bit of lime that I get right on the side of the pellet. It's not sour, but it's more like zest. So you get a little bit of lime zest on the side of the pellet, which makes you salivate and goes, oh shit, I need some more of that. Tahiki is actually an American hop. An America is called Cascade, which is a pretty dominant hop in the brewing world.
00:09:46
Speaker
Tahiki is a New Zealand grown version of Cascades so it's exactly the same plant but it's grown here in New Zealand so the flavor profile was completely different. We'll touch on that a little bit later on but so Tahiki you're going to get pith, you're going to get grapefruit, you're going to get dank. I'm sure people know what dank is if you don't know what dank is
00:10:10
Speaker
It's like opening a fresh bag of weed and you'll just get that big pungent smell of herbaceousness. Laurel has a dominant signature of citrus fruit, so oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, but it also has that really weird compound of very simple rosewater which comes in real late.
00:10:35
Speaker
and that will develop more as the beer conditions. So this beer, when it's fresh, has quite a lot of banana recipes coming out of it, like confectionary bananas. And that will slowly disappear the more that the beer conditions, but a hazy IPA, you want to drink as fresh as you possibly can to get all those big hot punches out of it. Yeah, the hot, just the overall
00:11:00
Speaker
fruitiness of this is crazy. And it's really interesting that it swings between the tropical sort of just generic tropic juice. Like I'm thinking of nectarines. Yeah, the just juice. What is it? Yeah, I think it is just juice tropical. It literally tastes just like that. But then it also has that that citrusy zig rightness to it. Yeah. And you're totally right about the lime on the side of your tongues.
00:11:29
Speaker
It's weird, eh? Yeah, it is bizarre. I'm sure people have seen the exercise where someone very, very poignantly describes the act of picking a lemon, smelling it, cutting it in half.
00:11:45
Speaker
and then taking a huge bite out of it. I mean, who hasn't done that? Yeah, right. And if someone describes that axe to you well enough, your mouth will salivate just by hearing it. And it's the same kind of thing. And that salivation is your body getting ready to digest something, getting ready to enjoy something, getting ready to eat something.
00:12:09
Speaker
And every time you swallow, you get that experience. It's small, it's tiny, but you mix that with the bitterness that you've got in there as well. And it makes you want to come back for more. And then as you come back for more, you get hit with that big luscious tropic. So it's a whole experience that goes from top to bottom. It's kind of crazy. We used to have an awesome here in New Zealand called Tropicana, I think it was, by Fuji.
00:12:36
Speaker
And it was like a sorbet vanilla ice cream. And it was, it sort of reminds me of that. Number three of this series was actually more like that. That was way more fruitier during conditioning. I was like, Oh my God. It's like old school Kiwi tropical fruit juice. Oh, sorry. Fruit salad. Like, you know, we used to grow up and mum used to get these big one kg tins of what he's fruit salad that had peers and Nick greens and on.
00:13:02
Speaker
uh shit what else is like uh cherries and those fake cherries yeah fake cherries tasty cherries whatever you call them and then and they used to always put in bits of grape and oranges and um all these other like bananas and stuff and that's that's all it reminded me of smelt it tasted it and was like
00:13:20
Speaker
I can totally see that, dude. That's a quintessential New Zealand experience, especially for people around our age. I'm going to have to make sure we cram a lot of that down our kids' throat just to pass the torch, I think. Oh, absolutely, man. It's a Kiwi way of life.
00:13:43
Speaker
The reason that I bring this up, and obviously this is generally a distilling podcast, although I do love to tip the hat to any other person that is chasing their specific craft.
Supporting Local Breweries Post-COVID
00:13:56
Speaker
But the reason I bring this up is that I want to let people know that you're not just a mad scientist, which we're going to get into a little bit more later on.
00:14:05
Speaker
And that you have some credentials. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that you are a professional. We may be slightly drunk now, and we may curse a little more than we would have otherwise. And we're definitely going to talk a little more shit than we would have otherwise.
00:14:25
Speaker
So you do have this Jacqueline Hyde thing going on, right? So there's two Jasons that I know. The guy I met first, which we'll talk about later on, and now there's the guy that I know now, which is the professional brewer or brew union. Awesome little brew pub. If you guys are even ever in Palmerston North, this is not the sort of area that you would associate with a really slick
00:14:50
Speaker
craft brew puppets. It's a student town, right? People drink to drink or they don't, they stay at home. Until you guys came along and you guys changed all of that. Yeah, thanks man. So I was born and bred in Palmerston North. So led a little bit of a sheltered childhood, moved to a couple of other cities in New Zealand, but always came home to dirty old Palmy. And yeah, no, you're right man. It's always been a bit of a bit of a drought for craft beer.
00:15:18
Speaker
We did have a couple of bottle stores that were pretty good, but there's never been a craft bar. There's never, well, sorry, I shouldn't say never been a brewery. There's been a couple of breweries that have come and gone, but I think we are the biggest at the moment. Yeah. Well, sorry, we're the only brewery at the moment, but we're the biggest scale that has been a promise for some time. Yeah. And you guys celebrate the craft of everything you do. It's about,
00:15:46
Speaker
coming and experiencing a flavor, not about getting ripped. It's not about getting on the tips. It's about tasting and you guys promote that actively, which is awesome. Absolutely awesome. We certainly try to, like we're all about, um, you having a good time as the punter, right? So, um, I know for me personally, it's, it's always making sure that the punters happy. So, uh, we talked earlier about, um,
00:16:13
Speaker
being an open space so we won't run one whole city block long but it's also quite it's also quite narrow so at one end of the building we've got the brewery in the middle there's the bar and then the other end there's a restaurant kitchen and an outdoor area so you can walk right through when we're making beer and you know it's it's absolutely fantastic I love it when people come in and they'll have yarns or this or me when I'm making beer if we've got a bit of spare time and just
00:16:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's fantastic. The biggest feel good factor for me is when people come up and they are enjoying one of the beers that I've made and they want to know more about it. So all of the beers that we've made, there's always a story behind it.
00:16:58
Speaker
That is the biggest satisfaction I think for any person that takes the time, the effort, the love to craft something right. I've put my heart and soul into this and you appreciate it and not only do you appreciate it, you want to know more about it, you want to know the story behind it, you want to know
00:17:15
Speaker
the the toil and the sweat and the blood and the tears that went into making that product. Yeah. So we can enjoy it together more. That's a thing of beauty for a craftsman. That's exactly it. And for me, I want you to have the best time that you can as a punter. So if me just, you know, doing what we're doing now, shitting the shit and having a wee conversation makes your experience better, then why wouldn't I do that? Yeah, totally. I love talking to people, you know, a bit of an extrovert myself.
00:17:42
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah you've got enough of that for both of us on the opposite when you put me in public i'm happy to pretend while i'm online but you know yeah i tell you what this uh this lockdown we're currently going through is playing with my extra lead quite badly i'm the opposite dude i'm loving it erin can't book the calendar up the wife can't book things up for me dude i just get to get things done it's great it's like a long weekend but a really long weekend for four fucking weeks
00:18:10
Speaker
When this craziness does die down and people can travel again and come and visit us, by all means, guys, please go visit this place. If you tied me up and drag me and then I woke up and you took the blindfold off, I was in Bri Union. I would have guessed, honestly, and literally, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass because I'm talking to you. And I'm saying all these nice things because it is my choice of hanging out when I do get the chance to get into town and have a beer. That's where I go. I would think that I was in
00:18:39
Speaker
somewhere in America, San Diego, Oregon, something like that. That's just the vibe that it has. So yeah, it's a cool place. And if you ever see this big gorilla in behind the cage at the zoo, just feel free to come say hello. I'm generally in the black boiler suit, so you can't miss me.
00:19:00
Speaker
Yeah, and he's a giant teddy bear, guys. Be careful. He does like hugs. I do. I love hugs. Yeah, he may hug you the first time he sees you. I think that's what I'm missing the most, A, to be fair, is just that physical contact with other people. Yeah, fair enough, man.
00:19:16
Speaker
I mean, the other thing that I really love when you get into a commercial setting like that is that you have the ability to bring people together from different ilks, from different professions, from different walks of life and make something that's truly special. And I got to come and hang out and do a gin tasting night with you guys, which was a collaboration between the gin maker and your head chef
00:19:45
Speaker
And I kind of went along thinking, eh, I'll get to taste some nice gin. I'll get to eat some nice food. It'll be good. That was about it. I also went in with the mentality of, that's great. You want me to make a cocktail? Sure. I'll probably try it. But dude, just give me the gin straight. I want to try it that way. And I walked away going, holy shit.
00:20:06
Speaker
Not only can this gin taste more gin like when it's mixed like 10 to 1 with something else But then you take a bite of the food and the food tastes better because of the gin and then the gin tastes better because of the food That's a dangerous combination man. I was blown away by that night. I gotta say yeah It's that's some pretty awesome feedback man. Yeah, so we hosted gin club every month so
00:20:31
Speaker
Now, obviously it's on hiatus at the minute, but we try and showcase a New Zealand gin as much as we can. New Zealand distillers. But some of them aren't always ginned, so we'd run them and actually brought along a single malt vodka. Nice. Which was really, really nice. So they had three gins, one vodka, and again, all paired with food. Yeah, no, they are very popular. They do sell out.
00:21:00
Speaker
like two weeks in advance so yeah if you ever um stuck for a ticket mate just just let me know and i'll see what i can do i'm gonna hold you to that video evidence on it too hashtag hashtag not really i see how it is
00:21:21
Speaker
I think we've done a good job of building up the profession that you hold as well. And I know last time I said this, you said, I'm not an award-winning brewer, but you guys did win brewery of the year, three years in a row now. Three years in a row. Yeah. So you guys are doing good stuff. And then the whole reason that I wanted to have this conversation first, is first to, I love what you guys are doing and I want you to be successful.
00:21:48
Speaker
Let's face it, when things open up again, places like small craft breweries are going to have a really tough time of it. I think anything that anyone can do to advocate for small local businesses, it's almost like a moral
00:22:06
Speaker
thing that I feel like we have to do, right? Like it's a good thing to support your local business. So there's that. The fact that I love it and I want it to succeed. I don't want it to go anywhere. So go spend your money there if you're going to spend your money. And I want people to understand. Spend it on my beer, God damn it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good. Yeah, it's good I can back from that.
00:22:26
Speaker
But I also wanted to give you a little credential in terms of the standard thinking in the industry, right? Because we're about to get way off topic now. We're going to go into the weeds a little on yeast.
Yeast Shortage During Pandemic
00:22:40
Speaker
And it's funny that you bring up the COVID-19 thing too, because part of the problem that we're having at the moment is that people just literally can't get their hands on yeast. They can't find it. People are buying up
00:22:53
Speaker
brew as yeasts to bake bread with. People that have never baked bread suddenly need to bake bread because they're stuck at home. Tell me all about that, Jason. Yeah. So I've managed to get my hands on some 12 year old sourdough starter. So I don't, I don't have any gear at home to brew with. So that's my fermentation is sourdough. Isn't that funny how
00:23:18
Speaker
you get it's like a gateway drug you get into any of these hobbies that involve fermentation yeah and suddenly any other craft or hobby that involves fermentation is like a side love a side passion a mistress absolutely so last year um we had a glut of um bok choy or the old chinese cabbage so i ended up making kimchi with that uh and made some sauerkraut with the glut of
00:23:47
Speaker
white and red cabbages we had. So they are getting very feral in my cupboard. Very nice. And I know when you say feral, that is a compliment. That is a term of endearment. Yeah. So, um, funnily enough, I actually suffer from gout, which is pretty, pretty shit for a bro. Um, so I found an online recipe for a, um, a gout, uh, sauerkraut. So it has a lot of tumor pineapples and cabbage in it.
00:24:16
Speaker
And that's got a beautiful pellicle sitting on the top. I just don't want to touch it. I think we're half an hour in now and I haven't seen you sipping on your drink much, but I've put away the best part of the year. It's not a challenge, but oh, you have. Okay. You've just been sneaky about it. Yeah. Yeah. You'd never know.
00:24:42
Speaker
So since we're talking about yeast, I thought I'd bust out this little beauty out of my cellar. So this is a beer from Ape Wide. It's a Britannomyces fermented brute IPA. So I think one of the misconceptions with bread, which is what we talked about earlier, is it makes things sour, but it doesn't. Sanus will come from other bacteria, such as Lactobacillus or Paedococcus. So Britannomyces is actually a yeast. It's not a
00:25:13
Speaker
Well, it is a bacteria, but it's actually classed as a yeast because, well, just because I said really. So just some tasting notes there. Super dry, hoppy, funky, and more than just a little bit fancy.
Brettanomyces Yeast Misconceptions
00:25:28
Speaker
So it doesn't say anything in there about it being sour at all. So if you get a beer that has pretend a rice is in it and it's sour, or you have a mash that you're making and you use
00:25:39
Speaker
Britannia my sees as its own. I just quite self if it goes sour, it's infected, which isn't a bad thing, because you know, Britain like they go really well together. Yeah, Jason was very nice too in the original podcast that we recorded and had to throw away. I mistakenly threw Brett into the sour category and Jason had to correct me. We talk about so we talk about funk. We talk about East profiles and redshift.
00:26:09
Speaker
I prefer funk over sourness. I like sourness, I like how it challenges your palate, but I like the funk because it challenges your palate more. It's like having a blue cheese versus a chamomile. Like, oh, they're both nice, but I would prefer a blue cheese over a chamomile because it's more complex, there's more going on. When you heat a blue cheese, it's different again, like just that umami flavor goes way through the cheese as
00:26:39
Speaker
different again. So for me, I'd love to have a Britannia Micey's fermented beer all of the time if I could, but I'm not about to make them. So that's an interesting point, actually, because I do enjoy a sour beer.
00:26:57
Speaker
But I like sourness and restraint. I don't like the big sour bombs that seem to be being pushed more and more, which is always the case with these sorts of things, right? Oh, boundary pushing one-on-one, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But when it comes to funk, generally you can give me as much as you want. I've never found anything yet that's too funky as a fermented product. Sometimes I must admit I'll turn my nose up at it initially.
00:27:24
Speaker
But I think there's that fine line between putrid and rotten, and just taking a little step back, and suddenly things become fun. It's intelligible. Well, and it's almost like an addiction. It's an addiction similar to spice, actually. I don't know if you're into spice or something. Yeah, I love chili.
00:27:52
Speaker
And the more you, the more you have it, you suddenly find yourself wanting it more. And then you suddenly suddenly realize that you've eaten the meal and you just don't feel satisfied. You feel like you can just keep eating and eating and eating and you don't feel satisfied. Oh, there's nothing spicy. Yeah. That's kind of, I'm growing my own ghost peppers.
00:28:20
Speaker
Here's the thing, guys, if you come to New Zealand and go to a cafe and you ask for huevos rancheros and then you say, bring me some hot sauce, they may literally bring you maple syrup with a slice of fucking capsicum in it and say that's hot sauce.
00:28:37
Speaker
Like I'm not joking, that literally happened to me. Sweet Thai chili is considered like it's going to melt your face off. Yeah. Butter chicken here in New Zealand is the hottest you will get to. All right. So now I know who to talk to about. Yeah, absolutely. I've got some Reaper sauce in my fridge at the minute that was. You're fermenting it, aren't you? No, this one actually hasn't been cemented. So the next batch I'm going to use
00:29:07
Speaker
Every single chili that I've got on my property, I'm going to smash into an urn and I'm just going to leave it. Give it a bit of inoculation and just let it go. Awesome. That's pretty exciting, man. This transitions nicely into the flip side of your personality. I mentioned before that there's two Jason's that I know. We've talked about the nice professional side, the guy that you let out in public.
00:29:36
Speaker
But this is not the Jason that I met first. The Jason that I met first, I met through the local Homebrew club. And you were the guy that was doing that. You would have seen some of my videos, surely. Through Manoa. I met you before I saw any Manoa brew stuff to be off. Oh, did you? Yeah, I did. I was not that much of a YouTube guy back then, funnily enough. What happened? I don't know. I don't know what happened. Yeah.
00:30:02
Speaker
I met it, met Jason through Homebrew, and I quickly found out that you were doing some weird and wacky shit. Do you want to tell us about, I know exactly what you need to tell us about, tell us about that. I made a beer. You did make a beer. What did you ferment that beer with Jason? I don't know, I just love fermentation and I just had this random thought one day, a silage, which you feed your cows,
00:30:29
Speaker
or cows or cattle is basically fermented grass. So, yeah, I had this wonderful idea that, fuck it, I will for me to bear with silage. So I did. So just I didn't realize that this is a thing, but everyone in New Zealand, if they don't know exactly what silage is, they at least know that it is that thing that you see. Yeah, you know what it is if you don't know how it works, I guess.
00:30:59
Speaker
So first, let's explain what silage is so people can really rat their heads around how crazy this is. So silage is basically grass that's cut during hay season, but it's more green than hay. And it is basically inoculated with yeast and usually wrapped in a barrel. Sorry, not a barrel, talking beer. It's usually wrapped in plastic to help it cook or help it ferment.
00:31:27
Speaker
And some people absolutely hate the smell, and some people, such as myself, absolutely love it. So you go through a local area, like here in Palmerston North, you hit the outskirts of town, and that's all you can smell is minting grass. And it's just glorious. It's so sweet, so pungent. And I, yeah, just thought, hey, it's good enough for a cow to eat, and I eat the cow. Well, I can't idea if I'll eat the cottage in a beer.
00:31:57
Speaker
It's so true, dude. Yeah, so it's a way to store the grass that's not rather than just drawing it out into hay. Yeah. And it actually gives the grass more nutrient when they eat it. So we in New Zealand will generally feed that during winter when there's a shortage in feed. So it's generally for dairy cows so they can keep producing milk over the winter months. But I'm on a dry stock farm here. So we raise highland cattle, which will
00:32:24
Speaker
get to later on, I'm sure. And so we use that just to keep them in good condition over the winter months when the grasses are growing so well. Awesome. So how did you go about fermenting a beer with, with silage? It was a tough one. So basically what I did was I
00:32:46
Speaker
I made up a starter, a starter worked. So I'm sure, brewers definitely understand that. I'm sure Distillers will by the end of this podcast understand it. So Word is basically unfermented beer. So I made up this little starter that was at a 10.0.4.0 starting gravity. And I grabbed a handful of silage, literally a handful, and smashed it into this worked.
00:33:14
Speaker
and just let it inoculate the sugar that was in the wort. Just watched it grow, basically. Once I was happy with where it was at, I made a beer with, fairly certain it was Vienna malt and East kid Golding's hops and just took the silage out of the wort that I'd made previously and started and just tipped it in and let it go. So I let it ferment as I normally would a beer.
00:33:46
Speaker
Taste it, sorry if you can hear the tone in the background there. Yeah, so I'll let the beer ferment out. It dropped below zero, so below the level of water. So it was fairly dry. I wouldn't say like licking sand dry, but it was pretty bloody close. And then it was fijoa season here in New Zealand. So fijoa is a pineapple guava, I believe is what it's also known as, but it's native to South Africa and
00:34:16
Speaker
were lucky enough in New Zealand or unlucky enough if you don't like it. I have quite a few trees of those in New
Unique Experiment: Silage Fermentation
00:34:21
Speaker
Zealand here. So my sister-in-law had a tree and I managed to grab eight kgs of this delicious fruit, hand-shucked it with my lovely wife, who you can probably keep going with the other background, froze it so the cell walls would break down so you get more flavors out of it, and then put that into the beer and left it.
00:34:42
Speaker
for about six months. In that six months the fruit was actually like half whole and when I went to wreck the bear out of that fermenter it was completely gone. There was no solids in there at all so they used to eat it. It was glorious looking pelicle on the top. Pelicle is basically a protective layer that the yeast or in this case the bugs are throwing out
00:35:07
Speaker
bugs I mean micro bugs not insects. Yeah anything other than Saccharomyces, brewers tend to call bugs. So similar to this here white film on my beer just basically protects the the word or the beer from from oxygen so the yeast can keep growing there and the bugs can keep eating all the sugars and creating all these off flavors so it looks like the crater of the moon so if you if you google pelical
00:35:38
Speaker
you will see something really. I love it. You waited. You paused for me to take a sip. So if you Google pelical porn, you'll, you'll see something really, really interesting images. So it actually looks like the character of the moment, white, you'll have little areas that are full of wine cream. They're not, they're not off, they're not, it's not bad. It's not going to kill you. It's just a protective film. So South character did it. I was talking about my South character. He's got a pelical.
00:36:05
Speaker
Kim Chee can get it if you let it go far enough. Any fermented food will eventually grow a palacorte. It's wild. Even in my commercial career, I've been brewing for nine years, and it has to be the best beer that I have ever made. The beautiful thing about it is you'll never be able to make it again. No, I won't. No, absolutely not. So reasons for that are quite a few. So the biggest one is the person that we use to make our silage now uses a different inoculum.
Challenges of Wild Yeast Use
00:36:33
Speaker
I'm not going to get that same flavor profile that I did out of that original batch and malt changes, hops change. And the most important thing for me is that my sister-in-law doesn't have a bloody free dietary anymore. I think this is a beautiful story to illustrate the fact that
00:36:54
Speaker
Anything you do with wild yeast is a crapshoot that can go wonderfully well or horribly wrong. Absolutely. And you just never know what's going to happen until it happens. No, you don't. So we touched on this before. How do you know? I didn't know. I smelt it when it was growing and the start on it.
00:37:19
Speaker
Smell absolutely feral. I tasted it and I tasted just like, like, like borderline rotten oranges, like, like just really juicy oranges. I think we'll get to a second point just before it started rotting where it just releases all of the sugar. And that's what it tastes like. And I was like, Oh man, this is gonna be awesome. So I just, I just went for it. Like I had nothing to lose. It was a 23 liter batch of beer.
00:37:42
Speaker
At the end of the day, all I was going to do was tip out 23 litres of beer and probably throw away the plastic from me where it was in to not worry about cross-contamination, but it worked out like you're right. You just don't know.
00:37:55
Speaker
I've put up a video recently about yeast because people can't get yeast. And we're going to get onto that, guys. Don't worry. I know we're 45 minutes in and we're not there yet, but we're getting there. And I get comments like I made, you know, I made yeast, which is hilarious in and of itself by doing X, Y and Z.
00:38:13
Speaker
you should do it too because it's delicious. And the idea that yeast that was harvested from a potato or from a banana or from a fruit tree or from someone's beard on the other side of the planet being the same as what I'm going to get here by pulling it from the same place. It's just ridiculous to the point where if you took two different handfuls of silage out of the same silage bale and put it into two identical starters.
00:38:43
Speaker
Yeah, I would have to imagine that they're going to end up giving you two different things. Yeah, totally would. Biggest reason for that is, in that respect, is the silage isn't always inoculated the same all the way through, right? So you're going to have more of one specific type of bacteria in one handful than you might in the other handful. So the same goes for when you're making yeast at home. If you use the potato here in New Zealand,
00:39:12
Speaker
and then you use a dirty old spot up in England and then you're using a dirty old potato over in America, they're all going to give you different flavors because the yeast you're actually capturing is from your area. It's not in the potato. It's not in the fruit. It's on the potato, on the fruit. Yeah, so it's the same as a Saturday, right? If I make a Saturday here at my place and you make a Saturday at your place, we're 20Ks away from each other, but it's going to be completely different.
00:39:43
Speaker
because I've got different, I've got different yeast in my house and you've got different yeast in your house. From a scientific point of view, you might find the same strain of saccharomyces in there, but it's everything else that's within that saccharomyces, like penococcus, like epsilis. Potentially botanomyces, if you're lucky enough, they give you your specific flavor profile. So if we turn that into wine making and we look at grapes, it's exactly the same thing for grapes.
00:40:11
Speaker
seven-year-old blanc grown here in New Zealand and seven-year-old blanc grown in France. They might be the exact same grape, like the exact same plant. It might just be a mother and a daughter style, but the flavors that you're going to get out of your finished product, even if you use the same yeast, they're going to be different because your grapes are grown in different areas. So the tua in France is different from New Zealand. So you're always going to get a different
00:40:40
Speaker
different flavor and that's just how nature is. I'm really glad we had this discussion before we got stuck into how to do it because I do want people to know that if you're fucking with with wild yeast you just don't know what you're going to get right and it might be amazing it might be horrible there are things you can do to potentially
00:40:59
Speaker
kind of grow something once you find it is delicious but it is the beauty and it is the downfall of this process that it might turn out horrible and that's great you start again and next time it's good but it might turn out absolutely amazing and it's never gonna happen again.
00:41:18
Speaker
as opposed to pitching a commercial yeast, which is consistent. You know that as long as you treat it the same way, if you give it the same food to feed on in the same environment and you make everything, you remove all the factors as much as you can, it's going to behave pretty damn similarly, right? Absolutely. And the good thing on the flip side of that, the good thing about is if you harvest your own wild yeast,
00:41:44
Speaker
is then that becomes your house flavor. So it's the same thing for brewers, right? Like say we use a house strain that's an American strain, but if we use that over enough generations, we end up making that into our actual house strain because it picks up, like you're never going to keep your yeast a hundred percent clean. You just, you can't, it's not natural. Unless you're in a sterile environment with negative pressure or all that shit, you're always going to have other elements that are going to become part of their yeast and part of their flavor profile.
00:42:13
Speaker
You know, we use this American yeast at work and we might get it to a sixth generation and it'll for me to bear it a day. That's phenomenal. But if we were to use it further than that, and the reason we don't is because the last beer is generally quite hoppy and it tames the yeast. If we were to use it further than that, we don't know what sort of off flavors might come from that. We don't know what sort of esters are going to come out of that. We don't know what is going to make the beer dirty.
00:42:42
Speaker
So duty, I mean, it's going to give it off flavors. It's going to make it, you know, hazy, maybe, because it's going to leave polyphenols in the beer. You just, you just don't know. But unless you have a go, you're not going to know. Yeah. Which is, which is the beauty of people being able to mess with this stuff at home, right? A commercial distillery, a commercial brewery have to almost by definition, chase consistency.
00:43:12
Speaker
They need to be able to put something out next time that was relatively the same as last time. A homebrew, it doesn't matter. Like you said before, the worst case scenario is you end up heaving 20 liters down the toilet.
00:43:25
Speaker
You forget about it and you move on to the next one. It's no big deal for a home brewer. And this is a bug there for me as a home distiller that it is not legal in America because there's an opportunity for this to explode, to have thousands and thousands of home distillers all over America.
00:43:43
Speaker
trying things and innovating and creating that influences the commercial world, which then influences the home distilling world in a wonderful little circle, like what's happening with the beer world. Yeah, absolutely. We touched on that earlier, right? And by earlier you mean in the podcast that we didn't record? That you forgot to push record on.
Craft Brewing Community Support
00:44:05
Speaker
The forgotten podcast.
00:44:11
Speaker
The forgotten cast. Yeah, we did. We touched on that earlier. So here in New Zealand, I hate using the word craft. We all get along. We all share, you know, ideas. We all share different things that we're doing and processes and stuff like that. Like it's such an open community. It's absolutely fantastic. A lot like the home brewing community is so open.
00:44:38
Speaker
I used to be on Homebrew talk many moons ago, a really big forum based in Texas, I believe. That's an absolute goldmine for home brewers. And if I'm honest, for us commercial breweries too, because we can see not necessarily trends, but we can see things that people are doing at home that we may be able to adapt into a commercial brewery. So.
00:44:59
Speaker
things like using Kvac, which is a Norwegian strain of yeast that has gone unnoticed generations and has now all of a sudden become a big thing in the commercial world. That was started by home brewers. It was started by people in Norway going, we've used this same strain of yeast for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. And it's just mutated over time. So for me to bear in a day,
00:45:25
Speaker
You know, I love his high gravity. So you give it something like an imperial step, gravity of 1.1, one, one, one. And it'll for me that in a day. It's not to mention stupid temperatures hot. Yeah, exactly. Like you're, you're stressing this yeast out. Yeah. Back from a borough's perspective, right? Like we pitch a KG of yeast to 1200 liters.
00:45:53
Speaker
So you put a teaspoon in for 1200 litres and it'll be for meant in a day. It's like how the hell is that possible? How can that yeast grow that much? It's nuts. It just goes against everything that you're taught and you learn as a brewer. I'm sure as a distiller as well. It just goes against everything.
00:46:14
Speaker
But it's nature, man. You can't fight it. No. And just to be clear, when you say a strain of, it's a, I guess you would call it a culture, like Kvike even of itself. It came from farmhouses, from the urban, sorry, not urban, the farm areas of people. Thank you, rural. I was trying to take myself out of that hole.
00:46:43
Speaker
It came from the rural areas of people literally, you know, we've got a shit ton of grain right now. We're not going to eat at all. We can't store it. It'll go rot. And what do we do with it? We'll turn it on some beer. Beer lasts a long time. You know, the same old story from all over the world. Used to also be used as payment as well for some workers. It's not like they were doing this in a sterile environment. It was... No, shit pack.
00:47:06
Speaker
It was what the dominant strains, the dominant culture, culture is a good word for it, I guess, because culture invokes the idea of it can be more than one isolated strain, right? It's a group of microbes. And now that it's come to the forefront in the commercial world, the commercial yeast manufacturers, YLabs, Y Yeast, those sort of guys are isolating individual
00:47:32
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Individual strains. Really interested from a distilling point of view, there's a couple of strains that will sort of a massive, massive amount of pineapple. So I'd be interested to see what, but as far as I'm aware, it's only been tested with grain. So I don't know whether you would look at a rum base. I'm not sure if you use grain for rum, but if you could use, if you can use that specific Covac strain to ferment
00:48:03
Speaker
your sugar cane for your run and then if that would carry through the still. I don't know dude. It's always a crapshoot trying to pick a flavor out of a wash and decide whether or not it is going to be something that carries over and it's turning into a more of a gut feel for me.
00:48:24
Speaker
in that you smell something and you go, yeah, I think this is something that's going to carry over.
Flavor Capture in Distillation
00:48:29
Speaker
And I think I'm starting to narrow it down in terms of thinking of it zones of volatility in that if it's too volatile, it'll blow off before you're actually able to capture anything. So when you first fire up a still, you'll get aromas coming off the still before any liquid even boils.
00:48:51
Speaker
And some of those aromas are delicious and amazing, but they're just disappearing off into the atmosphere and you'll never catch them again. And then on the other side of things you have, you know, just because they, like hoppers. And they evaporate so easily that
00:49:10
Speaker
you know the temperatures in the still isn't enough to in the condenser isn't enough to condense them back into liquid and even if it was it would come so far over in the heads that you wouldn't be able to capture much of that. Yeah we can carry through yeah. Well you'd have to cut it out in your in your head's cut and then on the other side of things you've got things that are so they just do not want to evaporate that they get left behind in the boiler and you know more things like bitterness, astringency
00:49:40
Speaker
For the most part, I've yet to play with it. What I would love to do is create a stringent, bitter bomb from wood. What I have done is distilled an APA from Matt Rookie, actually.
00:50:05
Speaker
I'll have to get you a sample as an expert and see if you can give me some feedback on it. Because the bitterness isn't there, but the impression of bitterness is there. You know, if I give you... So you can taste the pulp, but there's no bitterness on the tongue.
00:50:24
Speaker
But it's not hot flavor. It's not hot flavor like a brewer would talk about hot flavor. It's like hot bitterness flavor without bitterness. Do you know what I mean? It's bizarre. It's stringent. And it's the same thing. It's the impression of a stringency without a stringency. It's flavors that you associate with. Yeah, I'll give you something. So pineapple, going back to that, I would
00:50:53
Speaker
assume that pineapple is something that would carry over. I know that pineapple can be, or pineapple esters, not actual pineapple obviously, can be caused through esterification in the still. So that would suggest to me that the that group or that sort of collection of esters that are responsible for the pineapple flavor is something that can be condensed at least. So I would have to imagine that you can capture that out of a still.
00:51:22
Speaker
Sorry, if we just backtrack a little bit. So I understand a little bit about making gin with having a bouquet basket in the still. Would you be able to use, just for shots and gigs, you've got this really cool Quebec fermented mash and it's just giving you this massive pineapple aroma. Could you not therefore put some pineapple in a bouquet and let it? Yeah, for sure. You totally could. Yeah.
00:51:51
Speaker
Yeah, so the, I mean, JIN is created in a variety of ways. You can do it through just maceration and not distill it again. Just literally throw your botanicals into vodka, let it sit. That is cheating. Pull it out. Yeah. That's not really. You can also macerate the botanicals in the vodka.
00:52:14
Speaker
pull the botanicals out or not, and then throw that whole mixture or not, you know, just the liquid into the pot of the still. Or you can do what you're talking about, which is you basically put vodka into the still, into the pot.
00:52:29
Speaker
And then you put the botanicals in the vapor path and pass the vapors through to go through. So yeah, a hundred percent you could put, I mean, you could put pineapple in there. You could put, you could do something crazy, man. Like you could do, you could put mint and fucking coconut in there in the, in the vapor path. Like, like pineapple bomb in the, in the boiler or something. I don't know. We need to get together and make something, man. We do. We do.
00:53:00
Speaker
We're an hour in, Jason. We're going to talk about yeast, God damn it. Honestly, man, this is the cool thing about a podcast, right? Is that we've got time to just sit here and have a chat. Have a yarn. I can't do this on YouTube. I've got to keep it to 12 minutes, maybe 20 minutes. Two seconds, yeah. Pretty much, dude. Yeah. Attention span is short. I've been there, my friend. I've been there.
00:53:24
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So we haven't mentioned this yet actually, which ties in well. So Jason still has a YouTube channel, which I am thoroughly hoping is revived called Manoa Brew. And the brand might be revised yet. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Maybe I shouldn't have seen anything. No, no, you could buy.
00:53:44
Speaker
OK, cool. Well, check him out on YouTube anyway, guys, because there's a lot of random stuff that he's tried out and it's super chill. It's just conversational. It's literally like joining a dude in the shed to make beer. That's what it's all about, man. Yeah, totally. It's pretty fun. All right.
00:54:03
Speaker
let's talk yeast this whole this whole COVID-19 situation has people in people's panties in a twist over yeast which doesn't necessarily happen to be you know doesn't have to be so yes if people were wanting to catch wild yeast how would they go about that what would they do um just get into your local supermarket and grab some yeast off the shelf mate
00:54:34
Speaker
In all seriousness, it's real easy. So we talked earlier in our podcast that shouldn't be mentioned about trying to mimic what your yeast is going to end up fermenting. So if you're just doing a basic sugar wash, just make a basic simple syrup really is all you're going to make. But you want your gravity to be
00:54:55
Speaker
the low side I guess so you want it to be around 1.040. Make as much of that as you like split it out into some mason jars if you've got mason jars or just a jar or glass or a tumbler or jam jar. Glass is preferred because you're not going to allow oxygen in
00:55:14
Speaker
through a permeable container such as plastic. And then all you want to do is just a bit of cheesecloth, a bit of muslin cloth, a bit of oil, a tea towel, a cloth, just anything to keep insects out of going in, because insects will be attracted to the sugar. And then all you want to do is just whack them outside overnight. If you've got a large property, just put it in different areas around your property. Leave some inside. That's how sourdoughs started.
00:55:44
Speaker
Anywhere you think there might be a good aroma or a good flavor, so flower beds, your veggie patch, if you've got an orchard, whack it in a orchard underneath a fruit tree. Crikey, even in the middle of your paddock, underneath a tree that's full of pollen. I've got a ginormous pine tree at the side of my house here and I'm planning on just planting some jars around there at some point just to try and see what I
Guidelines for Capturing Wild Yeast
00:56:09
Speaker
can get. So you leave it out there overnight, preferably in the corner where you want it to be
00:56:14
Speaker
just about ready to frost if it does frost that's okay um the yeast will just go to sleep if it's caught anything the next day bring it inside get it nice and warm by warm i'm talking brewer's warm which is between 18 to 20 degrees but um i understand you you distillers like to ferment things at crazy temperatures so just at the normal honestly you're trying to get that yeast strain to be what you want it to be right so
00:56:42
Speaker
if you're going to ferment it warmer, if you're going to ferment it at 30 degrees, if you're going to ferment it at 40. It's more like 25 to 30 dude or 20 to 25 range where brewers will say you're crazy. But when you sort of think about, like you say, the goal, you know, we want crazy esters in our stuff and we're also, you know, especially talking whiskey or rum or anything that's going to be barrel aged, you're going to throw it into barrel and then all sorts of crazy things are going to happen with the compounds that you create.
00:57:10
Speaker
You've also got the ability to sort of fraction things coming off in different times on the still, to select certain profiles as well. So you've, you've got, we've got more steps than a bear brewer has. It's literally what's in the fermentation, that's what you're drinking.
00:57:26
Speaker
I think that's a huge part of it, yeah. But yeah, so I get your point, man. Like if you want to ferment at 22 degrees, 23 degrees, then you want to kind of capture stuff and then treat it at that same thing. So if you want to ferment at 23, you're going to see what grows at 23 degrees when you put it outside under the lemon tree, under the pear tree, in the field next door, in the lavender plant, whatever it happens to be.
00:57:53
Speaker
Yeah. And the good thing about that too is like you might get different types of explain. So, so generally you're going to get the same geese, doesn't matter where you put it, but there's going to be other things like, uh, like the bacillus and pedococcus and maybe if you're lucky that are going to be in there as well. So, you know, you might have something underneath your lemon tree and it's, it's used to having, dare I say, rotten lemons on the tree. So you're going to get that. Like if there's a rotten lemon on that trail, like in Britain, cause there's going to be some white stuff on there. That white stuff is yes.
00:58:23
Speaker
If it hasn't started going green and actually started to decay yet, you actually got yeast on that, that lemon. So, you know, you might get a, um, a lemon forward. Yes. I'm not saying you will. I'm just saying that that could happen. So yeah, it's a potential. Back to the expectations thing we talked about earlier. You may win. You may lose big. We don't know. The other thing you can do as well. Like if you, if you're putting out 10 jars,
00:58:52
Speaker
and you might have two that'll strike, don't be afraid of blending those two together to make one yeast because... Oh, that's interesting. Or one culture. One culture. Because what you're doing is you're increasing the cells of the culture in that medium, right? So you've taken 200 mils of this and 200 mils of this, and this has got 1 billion cells in it, and it's got 2 billion cells in it.
00:59:21
Speaker
We almost joined the two together and make 3 billion cells, which is going to, for me, faster, quicker, cleaner than it would if you were to stress it out and not have those numbers. So I guess once you have signs of fermentation, pretty sure you guys know what that looks like. You'll have bubbles, might have a crowd across the top of your yeast, across the top of your starter, sorry. Just look after it. Just keep feeding it. Keep making that simple sugar that you've been making or that
00:59:51
Speaker
1.0 for a word if you're going down the route of all grain And just keep feeding it. It'll it'll keep multiplying the yeast will keep growing We want to do is try and keep it in the in the growth phase So you don't want it to ferment all the way out you want to keep it so to use this multiplying all the time So you're going to get all those billions of cells trillions of sounds all those cells you want tons of cells to to ferment your
01:00:19
Speaker
to permit your work or your beer or your mash out. So just keep growing it up depending on what size mash that you have will depend on how much yeast you need. Not sure if you guys have a have a calculation for that.
01:00:33
Speaker
It's a lot looser dude, it's much looser. Obviously the commercial guys, the guys that are going for consistency are going to be a lot more consistent on it. To be fair dude, I think that home distillers were all about the over pitching thing before the home brewers were. The reason being is that home distillers
01:00:54
Speaker
can't be fucked cleaning anything. The theory is if you throw enough yeast at it, yeah, but honestly, it's kind of a case of you put more yeast in it, it'll ferment quicker and it'll out-compete anything else that's in the wash that you're distilling, sorry, fermenting. And often, I know this is absolute heresy for a brewer, but distillers will ferment and distill on the grain. So they'll mash
01:01:23
Speaker
They won't boil. They will pitch yeast into it. So they'll literally do a mash. They'll cool it down. They won't boil. They'll keep it on the grain. They'll pitch yeast and they'll have at it. So you can kind of see why throwing a shit ton of yeast at that would be advantageous to bump consistency up. So if you're doing that, if you're fermenting with your grain in the same container,
01:01:52
Speaker
You're about to pop a disc or something, aren't you? No, no, I'm not. That would in theory then become a sourmesh because there's lactobacillus growing on your grain all the time. And this is why he's a professional, folks.
Sour Mashing in Whiskey Production
01:02:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, you're 100% right, dude. And that is Australian. So they're going to take your sourmesh whiskey.
01:02:17
Speaker
Part of that that's one way you can do it. The other way you can do it is so it's kind of like keel-souring versus the other way they can do it is pull the the dunnage or the the left over stuff in the bottom of the still out of the still and throw it into the next fermentation and that stuff left in the still for something something chemistry something something science It's just gonna yeah makes sense to me
01:02:45
Speaker
Well, no, no, no, no, not from a not from a fermentation point of view from a you take a completely cleanly fermented wash, throw it into a still and distill it. You get you get a sweet tasting distillate coming over the still. But what's left in the pot is acidic and it's not because of fermentation. It's just because that's what's left behind. So then you take that and then throw that into your next fermentation and that can serve it as well. So you can you can go either way.
01:03:14
Speaker
But for example, I know guys that are purposely fermenting on-grain without boiling, that are pitching a mixture of SO4 and M1, which is the quote unquote McCallum yeast. And so they pitch those two things to do their thing first, but then once fermentational, primary fermentation is finished out, they'll wait for three, four,
01:03:42
Speaker
10 days until the wash starts to acidify. It's funky. Based on the stuff that's left in the, you know, that's come from the grain. Which is weird because as a brewer, you get rid of your grain as quick as you can, right? Because you have fucking stinks.
01:04:01
Speaker
But I guess because you're leaving it wet, aren't you? It's wet, it's not drying out. And you're putting a buttload of commercial yeast in on top of it as well to outcompete it. And the other thing is that beer, you have to worry about something funky happening
01:04:20
Speaker
in the vessel that you store it in, even if you... No, because this is all pre-boiled, right? So it doesn't matter. No, no, but what I mean is if your sanitary process is off for beer, once primary fermentation has happened, it can continue to go south real quick in the keg.
01:04:40
Speaker
Whereas for a distiller, you want it to go south, but I'm going to stop on this minute of this hour of this day, because I'm going to boil the crap out of it for eight hours, you know, and then nothing's going to live. Well, not, not of those, those microbes are going to live through that anyway. Definitely. Crossovers like you and I have talked about this quite a few times. There are definitely crossovers between a brewer's world and a distiller's world. It's just, yeah.
01:05:10
Speaker
how do we marry those together and how do we as brewers learn from distillers and how to distillers learn from us as brewers as well I guess. Very much so dude, very much so and I think the crazy out there ideas from one side can be the you know one man's trash is another man's treasure and I think that can come from brewing to distilling and back again. Just going back to your over pitching thing like I don't
01:05:38
Speaker
I don't believe in over-pitching from a brewer's perspective at all. I think it's a myth. That's exactly what I meant by it, right? When I was first starting to learn brewing,
01:05:49
Speaker
there was a very specific amount of use that you were supposed to pitch per, you know, per gravity per liter or per gravity per gallon. And now that thinking is changing, right? Which is, I'm assuming what you were about to talk about. I don't know if it is changing across the board. It's just something personally that I don't really give a fuck about. I would rather have too much use than not enough.
01:06:14
Speaker
from a brewing perspective you get a lot more off flavors from underpitching than you do from overpitching. We've overpitched the whole, well not the whole time, but the majority of the time that I've been at Brew Union, so I mean the beers come out pretty clean. So you know, I know pretty quick if I've underpitched and that's not from just saying I didn't pitch enough, you know, I only pitched half a kg versus a kg.
01:06:42
Speaker
I can tell pretty fucking quick, just even with the fume head, like if it hasn't kicked off by that night, depending on what time I've pitched, if it's not going by the morning, I know that it's not healthy. So I know either I need to pitch more or I need to let it condition longer to get those off-lampers to bigger off. But we haven't had that issue for a very long time.
01:07:04
Speaker
I guess that is the beauty in reproducing the same thing over and over again, right? As me as a distiller, I'm in the awkward position of always having to create something different to create content for YouTube. So I never make, I've never made the same thing twice, ever. In terms of distilling, it's always something different. So I can't refine a process more and more and more.
01:07:30
Speaker
which is the beauty of being able to do whatever the fuck I want of not being able to refine it. Right. And the flip side of that is the commercial world where you do refine something and you, you go way down that rabbit hole of making the same thing over and over and over and over and over again with one variable each time difference. Yeah. And that's, that's for me, um, with my, I want to say creative brain, like, you know,
01:07:59
Speaker
chose silage to permit with. I don't have that freedom at work to do that. Not bagging on my current workplace, but that's just how it is. And that's the joy of being a commercial brewer is I have to make that same consistent product. And I'm very proud of what I've made and the consistency that I've made it at. And there's little things that I can pick up batch to batch.
01:08:27
Speaker
because I know it's a different batch, but I don't know if the general public can. Yeah. And I mean, I guess maybe if you sat down and you had them taste every batch, you know, every day that it was sitting on tap and as it evolved on tap. And for me, there's a lot of talk about right place and the right beer. So sometimes, dare I say it, something like Corona,
01:08:54
Speaker
is going to be the best beer for that situation at that time. I 100% buy into that thinking dude, there's a place, my saying is there's a place in the time. As long as it's made well, I don't care about the style, I couldn't care less and even if it isn't the place in the time, I will enjoy tasting it and trying it from a purely conceptual
01:09:20
Speaker
He's like, yeah, I don't want to drink this right now. I'm not enjoying this right now. But I'm enjoying tasting it right now because I'm learning something from it. I'm pulling it apart and deciding that it was made well. Anyway, dude, back to yeast. We've gone horribly off track again. I feel like we may be sobering up a little or something. Hang on. Pause that thought. His glass has run dry. So I unfortunately don't have any single mugs.
01:09:51
Speaker
I do have a single barrel. Oh nice. Time and a place my man. Yeah. I actively attempt to not be snobby when it comes to whiskey or to any distill beverage for that matter. Cheers my man. So back to the yeast. Let's assume that people have
01:10:14
Speaker
have created maybe five, maybe 10, whatever they can do. Different jars covered in something to stop the insects getting into it, but allow the yeast to get into it. And they've spread that around different areas to catch whatever sort of ambient yeast happens to be hanging out in that spot.
01:10:32
Speaker
I think one of the biggest fears that people have is how do you tell whether or not it is going to kill you? How do you know that what you've caught is something that's good or bad, right? Because let's face it, like we said from the beginning, frequency of hit versus miss is going to be, I've got no idea. Depends on where you are, depends on what you're doing, depends on how you do it. But how do you tell? How do you decide whether to keep it or put it down the toilet?
01:10:58
Speaker
Just trust your senses to be fair. You will have an understanding about mold, I would assume. We talked earlier about a dunderpit. That just gives me the heebie-jeebies. But just trust your senses. If there's mold growing on it, don't use it. Don't taste it because it's going to be bad for you. Either give you the shits or it might fucking kill you. So don't do that.
01:11:23
Speaker
So how do you mold because to be fair if you're not initiated into this sort of thing A pelicle is gonna look fucking scary man. Got a hundred percent man. Pelicles are like Like I said, pelicle porn, right? Like they are beautiful So if you see green
01:11:47
Speaker
mold, throw it out. If you see black, if I can burn it with fire and then burn it with you because it's black mold, that will kill you. Yellow, don't touch it. If it's white, generally you're going to be okay until it starts turning fuzzy. If it turns fuzzy on the top, it's really hard to explain, but if you see a piece of fruit when it starts rotting and it starts going white and then it'll start growing, right? So it'll start growing these little spores
01:12:14
Speaker
off the white thing. That's not what you want. But if you get it quick enough, that cannot happen. So if you just keep growing it and growing it and growing it, then start fermenting with it. Chances are that the yeast will take over from the bacteria because it's stronger. Right. So if it's any color of the rainbow, don't fucking touch it. Just throw it out. Tip it down the toilet, put your put your jar through the dishwasher or sanitizer or whatever you got.
01:12:43
Speaker
Or just throw it out. Just burn it with fire and have another go. In all honesty, man, you've got nothing to lose, right? You've made, say you've got 15 out there, right? You've made two liters worth of the sugar syrup or wort or whatever you've got going. You've lost nothing. Yeah. You've lost absolutely nothing. And to be fair, you may not get any Palakkal. You might, just like Sacramento. You might very well like it and just have a sack. Absolutely.
01:13:11
Speaker
And if you do, you're going to know what fermentation looks like, right? So you're going to know it's going to be bubbly. It's going to have a krausen. It's going to be, I'm assuming you wouldn't understand what a krausen looks like with hops in it because that goes green, but we know that it's healthy. Yeah. Krausen will be creamy and it looks like a sourdough when it's when it's active. It's going to have lots of bubbles. You can take that off the top and put that back into another starter and it's going to grow the yeast again.
01:13:38
Speaker
So you don't necessarily, like I talked about earlier about bringing them all together. If you've got, there's one that's really, really strong and after day two it's got this crazy on it. Just grab a sterilized spoon, scoop that out, whack it into some more starter, get on as much as you can off the top and just keep going. Cause that's going to be for your next batch and then your next batch and the next batch and the next batch. If you keep getting it when it's, we brewers call it high crowds and your fermentations at a massive point.
01:14:08
Speaker
You can take that foam off the top. That's active yeast. That's ready to go. That's ready to go. Where's my sugar? Give me more. So you take that bit off. And some breweries over in England still do it. You take that off and put it into your next batch of... You probably don't even need to, to be fair, make a starter with it. If you've got a mash ready to go, just scoop it off the top and smash it in. What can happen?
01:14:32
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The worst is that you lose a batch, right? And it's, it's going to be in a CO2 rich environment above that. So nothing can grow in it. It's just the fuck I'd ever go. Yeah, why not? Yeah. And the thing is too, that is, that is a way to, we've talked about the fact that you never know what you're going to get, right? It's a crapshoot. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fermenting is like a box of chocolates. Yeah.
01:15:03
Speaker
Um, I'm not, I'm not, I say with, uh, with botulism too much. Um, to be fair, I've been quite lucky in all the stuff that I've played around with where that, that hasn't wrong as far as I know, cause I'm still alive. Um, it hasn't been an issue. I'm not a hundred percent sure what it would do in a distilling environment. I'm fairly certain he could kill it. Yeah. So, you know, even if it is there, you're going to kill it anyway. Right. So you might have a, um,
01:15:30
Speaker
an esterification in the in the studio mate that'll give you a different flavor you know who knows what it's going to turn into i have heard thrown about and i please don't anyone rely on this because i i haven't verified it but i have heard that if you ferment something with pretty much damn near anything in it and if it sours if the ph drops that you can be relatively certain that botulism is not going to be an issue
01:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, I'm the same as you. I won't stand by anything. I'm certainly no medical professional, so I won't do that. But what I will do is reference to a book that I've learned a lot of things about soulless and yeast. It's a book called American Sour Bear by Michael
01:16:20
Speaker
Tonsmere, I think is his name. I'll send you a link if you want to smash it up. Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes. I'll find an Amazon link. It's a fantastic book and it talks a lot about wild yeast and there's even some recipes in there if you want to give some of the recipes a go with putting them through a still. I don't know how that goes. Some of them are
01:16:46
Speaker
barrel aged as well. So if you've got barrels, you can smash them in there and then put it through a stool. I don't know what sort of flavours you'd get from that, but that does talk a lot about sourness or acidity in your mash, acidity during the ferment, acidity post-ferment. It's aimed at brewers, but I'm a hundred percent sure that people like yourselves would actually get quite a lot of information out of it, to be honest.
01:17:12
Speaker
I'm sure we would, dude. And the cool thing about distilling is that if it's safe to drink as beer...
01:17:19
Speaker
It's almost guaranteed. I mean it is guaranteed as far as I know. There's nothing to say that you put it through a still. All distilling is doing is refining for the most part other than a few things like esterification. Water's already in there. So if it's safe to drink as beer, if it is delicious to drink as beer, that's another question. But if it's safe to drink as beer, it's going to be safe to drink as a distillate. Yeah, pretty much. The other book as well is
01:17:49
Speaker
It's called yeast, the practical guide to beer fermentation. So that is one of my Bibles. There's four books in that series. There's water, there's hops, there's yeast, and there is... That's some zanashefs, isn't it? That's a series? It is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By Chris White, the zanashefs are heavily involved in that. That will also help you understand what yeast can and can't do. I'll read that.
01:18:16
Speaker
probably three or four times and I still can't quite get my head around what they talk about. And so I see the mention, I'm a looker, I'm a doer, I'm not book smart, I'd rather just sit there and do shit and play around and see what happens. But yeah, absolutely. If you've got the time to have a look at those books, grab them. Don't be shy, man, they are a wealth of knowledge and I'm fairly certain that there is so much crossover between distillers and growers because
01:18:46
Speaker
At the end of the day, you guys are making beer before you distill it. If I look at brewing back many, many moons ago, we used to all ferment in open vessels. We don't do that anymore because you've got that risk of introducing bugs and introducing wild microbes and stuff that you don't want in your beer. So everything that we do is now closed. So the risk of introducing wild yeast and bugs and things like that is pretty much null.
01:19:15
Speaker
unless you've got shit sanitary processes. So this is a really interesting thing to talk about actually because a lot of the discussions that come up in home distilling I've seen mirrored five years, ten years before in home brewing and one of them is
01:19:36
Speaker
Why would you be so freaking sanitary?
Consistency vs. Experimentation in Brewing
01:19:39
Speaker
Why would you be so closed? Why would you lock everything down? Because a lot of the joy that can happen is from the wild stuff. And I agree with that, but, but once again, it goes back to this idea of consistency, right? You just don't know what you're going to get. No, that's right. And for me as a, again, I'll go back to being commercial bro. Like my job is to produce a beer.
01:20:06
Speaker
and the A bear has to be consistent across multiple batches. B bear has to be exactly the same across, well you know, it's close to. So if I don't clean something out properly, if I don't caustic wash it, if I don't acid wash it, if I don't acid sanitise it, if I'm not soaking my fittings and hoses and things like that, I don't know what I'm going to introduce to that. So it's going to throw it right off and it's no longer going to be that
01:20:32
Speaker
golden ale or that Belgian ale or that IPA, it's going to be something different because the flavor profile is going to change completely. And that wild yeast that gets in there, one time out of a hundred might make it the best beer on the face of the planet ever. Yeah. Or you might have a wild yeast in there that tastes absolutely fantastic after week two and then week four, it actually tastes and smells like fecal matter.
01:20:57
Speaker
yeah you know so you just don't know if you're going to be polite enough that you're involved yeah yeah if you want to be fancy and you want to say that someone's product tastes like us like actual but it's like yeah
01:21:14
Speaker
Like shit. Like you've scooped out of the toilet and licked the rim. Endel. But yeah, and I think that's an interesting point, right, dude? Like you can, yes, sure. You can roll the dice. You can go with what's wild. You can go with what's quote unquote natural, if that's what people want to call it. You might come up aces. You might come up snake eyes. You don't know. You really just don't know. I guess from my point of view, man, just have a go.
01:21:46
Speaker
There's a catchphrase going around New Zealand at the moment that we're all on this together. I can't agree with that more. You just have a game, man. What's the worst that can happen? You got to tip some shit out and have another turn? The grand scheme of life, that's nothing. If you make a bloody shit batch of shine at home, you're not losing your
01:22:07
Speaker
feed your family, you know what I mean?
Capturing and Cultivating Yeast
01:22:09
Speaker
So basically what you're saying is that you can catch yeast anywhere. You don't necessarily have to put something specifically into the medium that you're growing it in. You treat it as a product that you want to distill.
01:22:22
Speaker
you assess it to see what it's doing. If it's doing something you like, then essentially you've got a culture that you can create a larger mash. So let's say that you made a, you want to make rum, you make a big ass rum wash and you pitch literally how would you take the product that you've got sitting in this mason jar or in the starter and transfer it from random mason jar from under the lemon tree into, you know, a full-size wash. Yeah, right.
01:22:52
Speaker
Well, I guess that just comes down to that calculation thing we were talking about earlier, but there's nothing to have that. And I guess distillers wouldn't use a lot of liquid yeast either, right? I very seldom would see it, dude, because once again, imagine the cost of pitching white labs into a 200 liter batch. I guess for the listeners, we want to just basically say that
01:23:22
Speaker
Creating a starter, you're making a liquid yeast that's not dried. So liquid yeast is gonna have more cells in it than a dry yeast does. Dry yeast, you're gonna get consistency. Liquid yeast, you have too many variables. So a lot of people won't use it. We don't use liquid yeast at work because what Jesus said is just so expensive. We have in the past used it and it's proved to be really, really effective, but it's just too expensive.
01:23:49
Speaker
The way that we're talking about doing here where you're capturing your own yeast and creating your own house strain effectively is what we're doing here. We'll save you a ton of money because you're not having to buy that consistent sachet. So you might have some esters that come out of the yeast that are going to be prevalent to your palate.
01:24:14
Speaker
And they may carry through the still which is fantastic. I'm I don't understand the chemistry behind four tiles and are still enough to give too much advice there, but Going back to your original question. How do you get enough to? Sorry going off on the best engine there. All you want to do is What's the normal size
01:24:40
Speaker
pitch that you do. Is it just an 11 gram sachet of yeast? Is it two of those? Is it three of those? You know, just generally speaking.
01:24:51
Speaker
I think good beer practices generally transferred a good distilling practices with the caveat that, like we said earlier, that sometimes you need to override other things that are in there.
Yeast Growth and Fermentation Techniques
01:25:03
Speaker
So larger is better than smaller, which I think we both agree on, you know, just on a basis level anyway. So how do you get it from mason jar to a pitchable amount? As you grab your mason jar,
01:25:19
Speaker
and you've been feeding it all this time, so every second, third, fourth day, when you start noticing the crowds and drop off a bit, give it some more sugar, but that sugar must be the same gravity that you have fed it at the start. Okay, so you're not literally just putting another teaspoon of sugar into the same jar. You need to increase the volume as well. Exactly. So what you want to do is you want to start, you know,
01:25:45
Speaker
1.040. I'll always go back to that number. That's the magical number for yeast. And it'll keep it in the growth phase. I think I talked about that earlier there. You want to keep the yeast in the growth phase. You don't want it to actually start fermenting properly. You want to keep it in that growth phase. So if you see that krausen coming up, like I talked about before, and you're skipping it off and ready to go, that's it growing.
01:26:11
Speaker
So what happens when yeast grows is you get one tiny little cell and multiply, multiply, multiply, multiply, multiply, multiply, keep going. So we talk about that in computer terms. Now you had two, but then you had four, but then you had eight, but then you had 16, 32, 64, 128, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just keep going. Exactly the same for yeast. It just keeps multiplying. It just wants to keep eating. So what you do is you have your mason jar and that might be just for example, 200 mls.
01:26:40
Speaker
then you're gonna grow up that by two. So the next one that 200 mils is gonna go into is 400 mils. So you're gonna make a 400 mil sugar solution, right? At 1040, that's it. Don't go any higher. You can go a little bit lower, maybe 1038 is the lowest, but you just, you need enough sugar in there. And then the next day you're gonna take that 400 and go to 800 for the next couple of days. Then 800 is gonna turn to 1.6 liters and that 1.6 liters is just gonna just keep doubling.
01:27:07
Speaker
uh for a 23 liter wash i would well for it for a beer would probably look for an ale strain to put in maybe two liters with the slurry but what you want to do yeah but what you want to do before you um pitch is is give it a bloody good shake up um if you're able to if you've got an oxygen stone which you've probably done it on
01:27:31
Speaker
I'm not sure distillers would use an oxygen stone at all. Actually, to be honest, that's probably one of the things that distillers are ahead of, or to be fair, if they're not using it.
01:27:43
Speaker
Because we don't have to stress about the sanitation so much, you can literally just throw a fish tank. Yes, I was about to say a fish tank. Throw that in and you're not getting the micro bubbles, but at least you're getting the surface turnover. Same thing, but do that before you put your yeast in. Once the yeast is in your mash, you want to put it in whilst it's still in a
01:28:07
Speaker
dare I say a sanitary container, but that doesn't work. But pre-pitch, get oxygen in there and get your yeast really, really excited. And then before you pitch, put the same oxygen in your mash. Get your mash really aerated. Get it really, really aerated. Get it so there's like a big head on it before you even start looking at putting your yeast in, because your yeast is going to be super healthy. That's going to be super excited. That's going to go, fuck yeah, I'm going to go and eat some sugar. Let me at it.
01:28:38
Speaker
I mean just just just tip it in. That's what it does. Yeah. Yeah. Just tip it in, man. Like don't be shy. Just tip it in. Don't, you know, fucking spoon it in. Tip it in. You don't even need to stir it, man. Like we don't stir any of these that we put in. I just tip it in and off it goes.
01:28:52
Speaker
So that's it's really funny, dude. Distillers love steering shit. They really do. They'll like, yeah, it's going to find it. You don't need to steer it at all. You're just disrupting it. Shit. Even to be honest, even if you just aerate the shit out of your bloody mash, tip your yeast and just keep it aerating. Wash the yeast is in there. It's going to do the same job, right?
01:29:12
Speaker
Yeah, as long as you kill the oxygen at another time, it's actually really, once you've gone through lag phase and the aerobic phase, as long as you're killing the oxygen before you're hitting where they should be going into the anaerobic phase. I'd just give it a five minute blast, man. If you can get through the bottom of your vessel where you're putting your oxygen in, come in through the bottom, because that's going to stir everything up as well, right? And then put your yeast on the top, give it a five minute burst and just leave it alone, man.
01:29:42
Speaker
The more you interrupt it, the worse it's going to get. So you, from a borough's perspective, you've got that risk of introducing wild stuff that you don't want. But I guess, from a distiller's point of view, that's maybe some of the stuff you really want in there.
01:29:56
Speaker
Yeah, or you just don't care about, yeah, yeah. So one last question I wanted to ask you about that thing is, if you're creating starters, so you started with 200 mils, 400 mils, 800 mils, a litre, you know, oh, sorry, 800, 1600, so on and so forth, do you let the yeast settle and then tip some of that liquid off the top so you're just pitching a more concentrated slurry? What's your opinion on that? It's much to the same, to be honest.
01:30:26
Speaker
You're never going to get rid of yeast that's in suspension. So you would have seen earlier, I was trying to get a bit of a hazy beer. So it was Jesse, so that has, that's full of yeast. Like the hazers is pretty much yeast. So even a clear beer, there's still yeast in it. So it's completely and utterly up to the person that wants to do that. If you're going to do that, I'd highly recommend crashing it before you decant. That'll get as much yeast as it can out of suspension.
01:30:55
Speaker
And by that I mean just putting it in your fridge man. Just just seal it Put it in your fridge overnight. You'll see you'll get multiple layers of gunk in your starter. So you might have a brown layer here, you might have a white layer there and then you have a nice creamy layer there. Tip out what you can without disrupting too much. Shake the bejesus out of it and then tip that into your next book.
01:31:20
Speaker
So once again, I think that's probably more of an issue with beer. And the idea being that as if you've created a starter in 1040, basically, golden ale without the hops, but you're wanting to make something that doesn't taste like, you know, that isn't a golden ale, you don't want to dilute the flavor of the beer that you're creating, you know, with a whole lot of with another six liters of
01:31:44
Speaker
Shit, that shouldn't be in your recipe. I mean, it's less of an issue for distilling, I think, because we're going to reduce all of that back down again anyway. We're not going to drink it as is, but... The other thing we haven't talked about is re-pitching on the yeast cake. Is that something that distillers can do? Oh, 100%. 100%. The only issue that I have with that is because we let things get funky, because we let things get sour. Mm. Why is it that they don't understand us?
01:32:14
Speaker
Well, just because in terms of yield, if you're letting other things go to work on the sugar before the saccharomyces, then you're creating less alcohol, you're creating more acid, you know, you've made a bollock. That lovely book, Yeast by Zana Shev will come in big time. There is some talk around lacto and Brett can't
01:32:44
Speaker
don't like the lag time is much longer than oh interesting yeah so you're used to start going to work first then it's going to start producing all these off flavors then lactose is going to come in and eat some more sugar then Brett's going to come in and try and eat some lacto but lactose is going to go fuck off I haven't finished yet so some of these more um longer chain sugars so there is yeah I
01:33:08
Speaker
I'd be interested to see how long a distiller can keep one use kit going across multiple batches of the same thing. But like you've just said, you don't have that luxury, I guess. Because you're always trying to. Yeah. I mean, there are plenty of distillers that are still perfectly clean. There's people that will do an all grain whisky with a false bottom. They'll pull it off as first runnings or all the runnings they'll pull off.
01:33:38
Speaker
And then they'll actually sparge, and they'll send that sparge back to the next mash, which is different. Oh, right. OK. Rather than putting it through into the kettle for the, you know. Yeah, because it doesn't have enough sugar in it, is it? Yeah, they'll send it back, and that'll be the first thing that they add into it. Anyway, you know, there are plenty that will do it that way, and then boil it to kill everything off, and then put your yeast into it. So in that scenario, I say, yeah, hell yeah, go for it. Like, I mean, I don't see a downside. Straight away, right? Yeah.
01:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean you're, and if you can get into a cycle too of, it's a great way to fill the pipeline that, you know, home hobbyists always talk about. If you can create enough products that needs to age and you can create it over time so that at the other end of it, when things have aged for a six months or a year or however long you need it, you've still got more product coming through that pipeline. Yeah, we talk about that from a sale, be a point of view as well. Like if you're barrel aging a sale, like a,
01:34:38
Speaker
lambic for example you like you start a lambic now and you keep going now like you just keep making it because what you do is you end up blending it back so you'll have a three-year-old lambic in three years time right and then you're gonna have a two-year-old lambic and then you're gonna have one-year-old lambic and you blend those together because the three-year-old lambic by itself it's gonna be sour shit it's gonna be like vinegar but it's gonna have awesome flavor qualities to it so you just need a little bit of sugar
01:35:08
Speaker
So that's what your two-year-old is going to give, but then your one-year-old is just raw and it's just punchy. So you had a little bit of that and it's, yeah, I'm sure distillers would do that with like blended whiskers.
01:35:21
Speaker
Oh dude that's how the big boys get a consistent product right as they're blending thousands of barrels together. But I guess what I meant for a home distiller is that if you can get into a routine of when you empty your fermenter out into the still, if you can create another wash to pitch in on top of the yeast cake,
01:35:40
Speaker
then that's a great way to get into the to the routine of creating another wash in front of it and even more so if you're in the commercial world and you can get away with that if you can buy one block of yeast whatever it happens to be and pitch multiple washes in on top of it a it keeps your production going and and it keeps you in a in a routine i guess once you get to know that routine of fermentation time
01:36:05
Speaker
but you're not buying more cakes of yeast. You're not buying more flocks of yeast. And like I touched on earlier, that will end up becoming your house strain. Like it will pick up, but it has to. Like there's just, you cannot, you cannot stop it. It will pick up your house flavor. My house flavor, I mean, there's, you know, all kinds of stuff. That's it. That will end up becoming part of that strength. So,
01:36:32
Speaker
And unless that's not what you want, unless you just want to make a grand neutral spirit, then you should be pitching brand new all the time. Well, even if you don't want to make neutral, if you just if you like what? Oh, four or five or.
01:36:47
Speaker
whatever. Yeah, that's right. If you like that and you wanted to be consistent to that, cause cause let's face it, the, the, the problem with the mutation and the house strain is you don't quite know where it's going to go and it may change over time. It might evolve over time. You might not be able to control it. It will definitely mutate. Yeah. Um, I, I know of, I won't mention, but I know of a bureau that's on the, uh, three years ago, I should head was on the 100th strain of us.
01:37:17
Speaker
Wow. They pitched USO5 once. Yep. Wow. I won't mention names, but they're on the 100th version of USO5 and it is fucking insane. Good or bad? Good. Really good. So we talk about diacetyl and beer, which is butterscotch, which is an off flavor. So we don't want that in our beers. Fucking terrible.
01:37:48
Speaker
And this generation of yeast will just go, oh, diacyl is a mumpkin. Oh wow, right. It's insane. So for those of you that don't know, diacyl is something that yeast will kick off during fermentation until the point where there's nothing else for them to eat and then they will come back and eat their own shit.
01:38:08
Speaker
Basically, yeah. And some yeasts are more prone to eating shit than other yeasts are picky. There's a hell of a lot of use that's more around, more like shitting that shit as well. Yeah. So yeah, as a, I'm not sure, it is a volatile compound. So I don't, I don't think it would carry through in the still. I don't know, dude. So there's a whole lot of,
01:38:39
Speaker
How do I put this? I mean, this is yeast talk. Yeah. Well, and just brewing in general, coming from brewing into distilling is a huge, huge benefit in a lot of ways.
Brewing vs. Distilling Perspectives
01:38:50
Speaker
Understanding enzymes, I think is the biggest one. Just understanding how a mash works and just getting to grips with that is a huge thing. Understanding how yeast works in general is a huge thing. Do you guys play with water as distillers?
01:39:09
Speaker
What are chemistries? That is not something that I've got into so much. And this is exactly where I was going to go with this, right? Is that all of these things are advantageous until they're not, until they restrict your thinking. So when I first started distilling, the idea of fermenting on grain was, what the fuck are you doing? How can you control that? You don't know what's going to happen.
01:39:36
Speaker
But I hadn't thought about the fact that it doesn't matter what's exactly going to happen, because it's only you want two days of it. You want three days of it just to get a little bit of sourness. Whereas as a brewer, you're thinking about what's going to happen two months down the track in the bottle that I've bottled off and left on the shelf. That thing's going to explode, you know. So another one is the mashing, right? Where if you threw corn
01:40:05
Speaker
ungelatinized corn at an average home brewer, that would probably be a pretty big stumbling block for a lot of home brewers because they're just not used to dealing with ungelatinized grains. Yeah, it's a huge advantage, but it's also something that you need to break through in terms of thinking freely, I guess.
01:40:28
Speaker
I'm still trying to find the balance. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm really trying to find the balance between a lot of those things because I had a lot of people. The one thing that I think is a horrible argument for anything is grandpappy did it. So therefore it's good or that's. Yeah. Why do you do it that way? Cause I've always done it that way. Well, why is that good? Because I've always done it that way. I had a very prominent, uh,
01:40:58
Speaker
member of the New Zealand brew community come through librarian not so long ago and helped me uh make a beer that he made famous and this guy is a process engineer by trade right so he sorry chemist chemist by trade but he's he's very process engineer orientated and he said to me don't don't be alarmed if i ask you why you've done something
01:41:22
Speaker
in your brewery and I was like, cool. And I said, my answer is always going to be, because the bus has told me that. And he goes, no, that's good because you can follow orders, but I want to challenge what you do. I want you to become the most efficient brewer that you can possibly be. I was like, okay, cool. And I said, I'm all about being lazy. And he said, funnily enough, the most efficient people in the world are lazy people.
01:41:47
Speaker
right? Because we don't want to spend, you know, back in 35 hours doing something we can take too. So he came through and we brewed this beer and he was there throughout the whole process and he already asked me one question and that made me feel so bloody good about myself, right? Because I have effectively made that brewery as efficient as I can. So
01:42:12
Speaker
flip side of that right is if you can make your process at home as efficient as you can and if it's taking a sideways step from the norm if you're getting the same result every single fucking time then what's the problem right and let me guess it depends on your
01:42:33
Speaker
what your goal is. As a commercial distiller, it has to be efficiency and it has to be consistency. As someone playing in a shed, it can literally be, I want to experiment and go next to
Goals and Collaboration in Brewing
01:42:46
Speaker
the yeast thing. This could fall on its face. It could turn to shit or it could be awesome. And we just don't know, but I'm going to give it a roll because
01:42:55
Speaker
It's a hobby and that's what I think is fun, you know? So a lot of the stuff, and you see arguments all the time about this sort of stuff, you know, you should do this or no, you should do that. And I think a lot of it comes back to, well, what is your goal? Is your goal as a commercial entity or is your goal as a, yeah, and yes, is the goal. I want to know what's going to happen before it happens. So I can be consistent with it and efficient with it. Or is your goal,
01:43:24
Speaker
I want to open myself up to the great unknown. And as long as you're on your decisions in terms of whether or not they're going to lead you down the pathway or the all power to you as far as I'm concerned. I guess the flip side of that is what do I always do it then? Well, I don't want to do it that way because I want to be a trailblazer. Yeah. Yeah, there's nothing. I mean, that's the only way that change happens.
01:43:53
Speaker
I'm not sure if I even remember if we managed to answer the question that we came here to answer. Did we answer that question? I don't know. I think so. Maybe we're remembering the other podcasts that we recorded. I'll tell you what, you listen to it tomorrow and tell me and if we have, then we're good. If we haven't, you let me know and we'll go again.
01:44:20
Speaker
I think I've heard a little rumor that you do want to kick off, you want to rebrand this Manowabru thing and kick it off again. And when we get there, I do think that there is some serious, serious potential for us to collaborate on some stupidity. OK. And when I say stupidity, I mean, open ourselves up to see what the fuck can happen. Yeah, I won't give too much away, but fuck you, man. I'm keen as.
01:44:51
Speaker
We can do some, I would love to see what happens if you put a silage brood product through a still. I don't know the answer to that. I'd love to just have someone like yourself come and make some spirits for me to be fair.
01:45:05
Speaker
Yeah, dude, I'd be totally open to it because there's a whole wide world of fermentation, yeast, the technical side of the brewery stuff that I've never been exposed to. And I think that pairing that with the ability to do whatever the hell you want on a home distilling scale would be, that could be pretty epic, man. So I'd love to play.
01:45:31
Speaker
In any case, cheers, man. I thoroughly appreciate it for all those listening at home. Dear God, I hope you were drinking too because I'm sorry.
01:45:48
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sorry guys, that was a little messy. Sorry about the dog in the background. Sorry about the laggy internet. It's just kind of the way it is in this COVID-19 situation with everyone at home. And I hope you had a drink to drink along with us, because otherwise that might have been a little bit weird for you. But a huge, huge thank you to Jason. That was amazing. I love talking to this guy. I need to find time to do it more regularly. And I really can't wait to figure out what crazy things that we might be able to do in the future together.
01:46:15
Speaker
Thanks a bunch for hanging out, everyone. I had an absolute blast. If you know someone who's in the industry who does anything cool in the space of beer, wine, spirits, barrel making, whatever it happens to be, if you think there's someone that I need to talk to, you can get in touch with me through the chasethecraft.com website and make a suggestion. That'd be awesome. All right, guys. Till next time. Keep on chasing the craft. See ya.