Introducing project Hanssens

Now that I successfully hav isolated a Saccharomyces and a Brettanomyces strain from Orval, it is time to go wild. A few weeks ago, I drank a Hanssens oude geuze. I saved the dregs and poured some DME wort on to bow some life into this wild dormant soup. After a day, the dregs had come to life and were happily producing CO2. I will now plate out this mini starter and hope to get some nice colonies. By making a starter I should have favored the growth of Saccharomices strains, so theoretically thay should show up first on my plate. After a while I also hope to get some Brett strains appearing. I also would like to get som Pedio or Lactobacillus out. For that I will use DME agar supplemented with 10 % tomato juice, some dead yeast and 2% CaCO3 to buffer te acid produced. As a teaser, here's a picture of what my mini starter looks like under a microscope. The tiny rods are most likely Lacobacillus of Pediococcus. The bigger cells look like yeast, of which the round ones look like Saccharomyces and the smaller ones Brettanomyces. To be continued...

Project Orval

My yeast bank is steadily growing. Untill recently I just saved commercial yeast and yeast from bottle-conditioned beer on slants or in the freezer. But last week I started a new project: "Project Orval". Orval beer is brewed using a Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast strain in primary permentation. According to Stan Hieronymus in "Brew lika a monk" Orval uses a "yeast from the area" in secundary fermentation. This "yeast" is supposed to be a mixture of yeasts of both Saccharomyces and Brettanomyces. For a yeast enthusiast like me this is an experimental gold mine. I have streaked out the dregs of an orval bottle on a wort agar plate and picked a whole range of colonies looking different. I have seen big, small and tiny colonies. Of those I have now more then 15 clones which I plan to test (either all or some) in small scale (500 ml) fermentations using a neutral wort. This should be enough to fill one bottle from each fermentation. I will then test all bottles after a few months and see how my strains behave.