4-3-2-1 Bread

If your only experience with yeast is brewing beer, you're missing the point. Yeast is one of the greatest gifts on this planet. Wine, Beer, Rum, Whiskey... Bread. All of these things do not exist without yeast. Man alone can not create alcohol... and in this post, man alone cannot create good bread without yeast.

After a recent trip to {warehouse store of your choice}, the wife picked up a 50lbs bag of flour for less than $12. I know what you're thinking, "50lbs of flour, I'll never go through that!". Yes you will, as honestly this is my second bag.

I did a lot of elaborate recipes at first; pizza doughs, cinnamon rolls, artisan herb breads, croissants (be prepared for 2 days work). At the end of the day, I wanted to create a stable, easy to make, and easy to remember recipe for a damn good bread. Behold.

You'll need 1 9x5 loaf pan, some non-stick spray (or some oil and a paper towel to grease said pan), and the following in a mixing bowl;

4 - Cups Flour
3 - Tsp Sugar
2 - Tsp Yeast (* A Fleischmann's ActiveDry 4oz jar is cheap)
1 - Tbsp Kosher Salt

* - Believe it or not, you can brew with this in a pinch. No, your beer won't come out tasting like bread. It's a good backup when a starter goes bad.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl with a whisk.

Pour 1 1/2 cups of warm water into a well in the flour and place in your electic mixer until all has come to a sticky dough (you can do by hand if you don't have a stand mixer, no big whoop).

Once incorporated, lightly flour a clean surface and kneed dough a few times until smooth. Its not rocket surgery, just flatten and fold over half a dozen times.

Place dough into the greased loaf pan and place in a warm place until the dough has risen to the level you are satisfied with (hour or two). Bread (yeast based) will not rise anymore than it has already risen when placed into an oven. That process would require baking powder and that is another post that you can find on another blog. So, the state that it is in when you put it in the oven is the state it will be in when it comes out (more less).

Once you are satisfied with the rise, preheat your oven to 350 (325 for convection). If desired brush on an egg wash (1 egg & 1tsp water), sprinkle on some sesame seeds, and toss the loaf into the fire.

Wait 25-30 minutes until nicely browned and remove to cool. A suggestion, as hard as it may be, wait until the loaf pan has completely cooled to the touch to remove, it just works easier that way. Then again, like early beer, do whatever you want. Its bread at this point right?

Well, my rambling aside, I hope you find this recipe for a damn good bread to be as easy and delicious as I do. Sometimes things don't need to be so difficult to be rewarding. Like brewing, the more bread you bake, the more familiar you'll become with how the fermentation process works, and hopefully something tasty to satisfy those late night munchies after enjoying some good homebrew.

Two years and 29 days.

I brewed today for the first time in a long while. Brewing is one of those skills, that once you acquire it, its like riding a bike. You know exactly what to do.

I dove into the boxes like an IRS agent looking for fraud. Cataloging all the glassware, identifying the pieces I needed to sanitize, raveling in the brilliant sparkle of glass adorned with graduates and symbols. Once the items of interest were isolated, it was down to one simple last task. Open a beer.

I admired in my brew-memory as I ignited the burner, and set the wort into motion. For I am not cooking a meal, I am making beer!

Tender care through the first boil, waiting for the hot-break... Done. 55 minutes bittering... This is the time where you contemplate the world. The calm before the storm... The little time you have to relax while brewing, because you know the rush is coming. 5 minute aroma hops, and its crash cool, airate, and clean.

I hadn't brewed a beer in a long time. Without spelling it out, I'm assured you know how long, but its one of those things. The smell of iodophor and boiling hops. Sweet wort and propane. Its a smell that sticks with you like the smell of the first stripper you fell in love with, yet couldn't take home to mom. It gets in your blood.

Brewing is a labor of love that you should expect, most won't understand; yet will gladly reap the benefits.

Yeast and sweet wort. God does love us doesn't he?

Brettanomyces, Pellicles, & Oak Barrels

I acquired an oak barrel to age half of my Winter Warmer ale this year to give it that Extra Special Reserve (heh, ESR) kind of a kick.

Well it appears, using the oak barrel, I got more than I bargained for!

This year I did a 10 gallon batch of my winter warmer. 5 gallons got the normal treatment, bottling, and are currently aging. The other 5 gallons instead of going to the bottle spent an extra week in the oak barrel, and then last Sunday were racked to my secondary.

Well, yesterday (Tuesday night) I took a look and the secondary now has a white milky film across the top (Brettanomyces Pellicle). I then took a sample of the film and inspected it in the microscope expecting to find bacteria and a lost batch of beer. To my surprise it wasn't bacteria at all. It appeared relatively the same size as yeast cells, only sausage shaped instead of round like a yeast cell. It was much larger than bacteria, and contained a nuclei so I can pretty much be assured it's not bacterial and is indeed a Eukaryote (see budding yeast cells in image below). 

So, that got me on my search to which I found this in the homebrew wiki.

Quote:

"Brettanomyces, often called Brett for short, is a genus of yeast consisting of multiple species found naturally in wood. Brettanomyces contributes distinctive flavors to the beverage it grows in. It gernerally considered an undesirable, spoiling infection by home brewers; however, its extreme, distinctive flavor and aroma is considered desirable in some sour beer styles, and at low levels it is depended on to add complexity to many styles of wine."

Wikipedia adds;

Quote:

The cellular morphology of the yeast can vary from ovoid to long "sausage" shaped cells. The yeast is acidogenic and when grown on glucose rich media produce large amounts of acetic acid. Brettanomyces is important to both the brewing and wine industries due to the sensory compounds it produces.

In the picture of the secondary you can see a white film that has formed on the racked beer. Interesting enough the purpose of this "white film" or "velo de flor" of yeast gives the beer protection from oxidation and other infections by preventing air from contacting the wort. This is indeed going to be some strange brew, but the technique of using "wild" yeast (Brettanomyces in this and most cases, and sometimes the bacteria Lactobacilus) is not an uncommon one and is done in a very sought after style of Belgain beer refered to as a lambic.

Since my winter warmer is indeed a sort of spiced up brown ale (with cloves, cinnomon, nutmeg, to name a few), I figured I'll roll with it and see how it turns out. It seems to be a very fitting style for this experiment. 

I have put a previous batch (another brown ale) through the barrel already, and the same thing happened, though I ignored it as a mild infection and bottled it. The Brown was a little sour, and very complex, and actually pretty good after it aged a few months.

After the brown ale "infection", as I assumed, I went ahead, and just sanitized the barrel really well with Potassium Metabisulfite and let that sit for a few months prior to my Winter Warmer figuring that would be enough to pretty much kill anything. Apparently it doesn't kill Brettanomyces in the dosing regiment I used (1/2tsp Potassium Metabisulfite per 5 gallons) like it does normal yeast and bacteria. Apparently even most sanitizers will not kill it, though I've heard rumors that StarSan will, and other sites confirm that Sulfur Dioxide does.

As for the barrel, there is no way of ever ridding it of it's personal yeast. Being porous by nature, the wild yeast more than likely is embeded deep in the wood, and has been there from the beginning of the life of the forest it came from. So I do expect to do some very interesting lambic fruit styles in the future using nothing but the barrel as the yeast source.

As for the Winter Warmer, I got a 25ml sample to try. The smell was good, alcohol (it is near 9% after all), oak'y, special spices, cloves, wintery, a hint of sourish-ness but nothing harsh. Something to be excited about!

Overall, nothing taste or smells out of whack, pretty much like I expected it to taste. So cool, well see how it ends up! Should be an interesting result.

Fermentation Tube

I'm a bit of a sucker when it comes to lab equipment. I love gadgets. This is one of those things I picked up that I figured would just be a novelty, but became a coveted piece of equipment in my lab.

A fermentation tube is essentially a way you can visually be assured the yeast you are cultivating are alive and well. When yeast convert sugar to alcohol a byproduct is CO2 gas. When working with very small scale fermentation you often can't get a real good visual (without a microscope) of how well the yeast are preforming. When I reanimate a strain from storage in a test tube, I don't have any real visual reference to know if the yeast is becoming viable. With a fermentation tube, you can view the amount of gas being created and then verify your yeast is indeed working away and its not just some bacteria (as bacteria will cloud the wort, create sediment, and not produce any gas).

As you see in the photo, it's nothing more than a curved tube with a larger reservoir to collect the wort as the gas gathers at the top of the tube. The actual tube is graduated (10ml in my example) to allow you to note the amount of CO2 being produced.

I generally use this to test my stored samples, or to reanimate a strain for a starter. Works well, and is neat looking to boot!

Sterile Water Yeast Storage

This was sort of the catalyst for the whole blog. I ran across an article written by Dave Whitman titled "Sterile Distilled Water Yeast Storage". In this paper, Dave details pretty much everything I have going here. Instead of just regurgitating everything Dave wrote in my own words I'll just repost his article here for archival purposes (as he grants this at the bottom of his article) and add my notes before.

I will attest that, this method works. How long it works I guess is up to your lab habits. I've been able to isolate and store over 6 strains of yeast in 1 dram vials and take those and reanimate them in clean test tubes. For the sterile water, I am using generic saline solution that you would generally use for contact lenses. 

So bravo Dave for writing this! Your work is well appreciated.

Sterile Distilled Water Yeast Storage

v1.0 10/1/96 by Dave Whitman (dwhitman@rohmhaas.com)

INTRODUCTION

Yeast can be stored for long periods of time (months to years) in a dormant state under sterile distilled water. The samples are tiny, so you can keep many different yeast strains in a small area. No refridgeration is needed.

The procedures I use are largely adapted from a 1 day course in yeast propagation that I took at the American Type Culture Collection. ATCC is in the Washington DC area, and they give the course once a year; I recommend it highly if you're within driving distance. There is a very nominal fee ($30?), and you come away with free yeast cultures to offset the cost of the course.

STERILE TECHNIQUE

Be fanatical about sanitation. You'll be transfering very small numbers of yeast cells around, and the tiniest amount of bacterial contamination can force you to re-isolate a culture.

Wort, distilled water, and all containers should be STERILIZED (not just sanitized). This means pressure cooking 20 minutes at 15 psi, or repeatedly boiling for 30 minutes on 3 days in a row.

I sterilize my innoculation loop by heating it in a flame until it turns red, then quench it by touching sterile water or the surface of a slant. Alternatively, you can use sterile flat toothpicks - wrap a bunch in aluminum foil and pressure cook along with everything else. Another option is to use disposable sterile syringes.

Work in a draft free room to avoid stirring up dust. Avoid using a vacuum cleaner in the same house for several hours before, because it will stir up dust. Wipe down your work surface with bleach diluted 10:1 just before starting. Follow that with a alcohol wipe down. Open and close containers quickly, while trying to hold the opening horizontal (to minimize the chance of dust drifting in).

Arrange everything in an organized way on your work surface so that you don't have to move your hands around too much and generate air currents.

PREPARATION OF SAMPLES FOR STORAGE

Start with yeast cultures growing on slants or plates.

Add 2-3 ml distilled water to small vials. I use 1 or 2 dram vials, readily available at places that sell essential oils or bulk perfumes. Pressure cook the loosely capped water vials for 20 minutes at 15 psi.

Using a sterile loop or other implement, grab a small amount of solid yeast from a slant. You don't need or want too much - about the size of a match head. Try to avoid picking up any of the solid media. Transfer to a water vial, then cap it tightly and wrap the cap with tape to seal. I like to make 2 vials of each yeast. One is "working", the other is "archival".

You can store these vials at room temperature for at least 6 months, probably for years. The concept is that in distilled water with no nutrients around, the yeast just go dormant. (That's why you want to avoid transfering any nutrient media when you grab the sample - you're TRYING to starve them).

PREPARATION OF STARTERS FROM STORED SAMPLES

I make up premeasured samples of starter wort ahead of time: SG 1040 wort, pressure canned in containers of the right sizes to build up a reasonable starter volume in safe steps. I use a 3-step build up: 4 mls of wort in ascrewcap test tube, 40 ml of wort in a 10 oz juice bottle, and 350 ml of wort in a 16 oz juice bottle.

The nice thing about using old juice bottles is that they have vacuum seal caps. Put the caps on loosely, pressure cook 20 minutes at 15 psi, then tighten lids while the wort is still fairly hot. As they cool, the vacuum seal should form. The test tubes don't have vacuum seal lids, but if you tighten them and tape the joint, they seem to keep well. After sealing, shake up the samples to pre-aerate them using the air in the head space of the container.

I start building my starter up 1 week before brewing. Shake up a "working" vial to resuspend the yeast, then open it and quickly transfer a single drop of suspension into a test tube with 4 ml of wort using a sterile tool such as aninnoculation loop. Reseal the vial and loosely cap the test tube. Because you use only one drop, as long as your sanitation is good the stored culture can be used for many, many batches.

Let the yeast work for 1-2 days, swirl and dump the whole thing into a 40 ml wort sample. Don't expect to see much of any activity at either of these stages - there just isn't enough yeast to generate any obvious CO2 evolution. After another 1-2 days, swirl, then dump the whole 40 ml into a 350 ml wort sample. After 1 or 2 days, you should see visible bubbling in this larger starter. You could (and arguably should) continue to step this up to even higher volume, but for ales I get good results just dumping the 350 ml starter into a 5 gallon batch.

I don't bother with an air lock for any of the starter stages - I just keep the lid on loosely to allow CO2 to escape. I haven't had a starter go bad yet after about 10 batches. YMMV.

LONG TERM CULTURE MAINTANENCE

Periodically, it's a good idea to reculture the yeast to ensure that they're alive and healthy. At the ATCC course, they recommended reculturing every 6 months, although they said there was literature precident for storing samples for 5 years. For comparison, they said that if you use slants for storage, you should reculture every 2-3 months. I suspect many people keep slants far longer than this.

They also recommended only saving samples in water that you pull off of solid media like a slant or plate, since you can look at it and see if there is any obvious contamination.

To reculture, prepare slants. Open your "archival" (unused, and hence uncontaminated) vial, and streak a single drop of slurry onto one or more slants. Let them grow out, and assuming the colonies looks clean and healthy, transfer to sterile distilled water for another storage period.

SLANT PREPARATION

Prepare a small amount of SG 1040 wort. Add 1.5% agar by weight, and heat until the agar dissolves. While still hot, add 2-3 ml of solution to 2 dram vials, then loosely cap. Put the vials in a tin can or something to hold them upright, then pressure cook 20 minutes at 15 psi. While still hot, tighten the caps, then prop the can at an angle to tilt the vials at a 45 degree or greater angle. Allow to cool and solidify.

You can buy agar cheaply at oriental groceries. In my area, it comes in packages of 1" square sticks that are about 10" long. There are 2 sticks to a package - one is off-white, the other is dyed lurid red which makes it easy to spot on in the store. The sticks have the texture of styrofoam, and you can easily break off or cut little pieces for making slants.

German Kölsch

From the Wikipedia page on Kölsch...

Kölsch is a local beer speciality, brewed in Cologne, Germany. It is a clear beer with a bright straw yellow hue, and it has a prominent, but not extreme, hoppiness. It is less bitter than the standard German lager beer, Pils. Furthermore, Kölsch is top-fermented at a relatively warm temperature (13 to 21°C, or 55 to 70°F) and then cold-conditioned, or lagered.[1] This manner of fermentation links Kölsch with some other beer styles of central northern Europe, such as the Altbiers of northern Germany and the Netherlands.

If you're like me, the likely hood of brewing a pilsner eludes us. It's not lack of knowledge, but lack of a stable environment to ferment it in (ie. keeping temperatures in the lagering range). I have a lot of things, but a fermentation cellar, I do not. :(

I suppose that is what makes the Kölsch style so popular amongst homebrewer community. You can get the best of both worlds, at ale compatible fermentation temperatures. Light color, crystal clarity, and light crisp taste that is very reminiscent of a lager yet retaining a hint of that ale yeast complexity we all love.

While I've never actually been to Cologne, Germany (the only place that can actually call a Kölsch a Kölsch), or even had a real Kölsch alt beer, I do like to think we can get pretty close right here in our own back yard.

This is a recipe that I got from a fellow homebrewer at the LHBS, and in his opinion this is as close to tasting a Kölsch as your going to get without hopping on a plane and flying there. Well, at least he did say no one has ever complained, and having brewed it myself, I tend to agree. Its a great recipe, and simple to boot.

Grains & Extract

(Steep grains 30 minutes @ 150F)

4lbs      Pilsner DME

1lbs      Pilsner Grain

.5lbs     Light Munich

.5lbs     Carafoam

.15lbs   Vienna

Hop Schedule

1oz        Select @ 60 Minues

.25oz    Select @ 15 Minutes

.5oz      Select @ Flame Out

Yeast & Other

*Safale US-05 or Kölsch Yeast

Whirlflock tablet @ 15 minutes to speed clearing

Follow the normal rules with brewing and fermentation. After you have finished fermenting **bottle or keg the beer as usual and lagger in the refrigerator or kegerator for a couple of weeks. The longer you wait, the clearer it gets. 

Feel free to add your recipe in comments if you have one.

Enjoy! err.. Prosit!

* I would say use Safale unless you are able to ferment in cooler temperatures (like 65F-68F).

** If you are bottle conditioning, you might consider a week at room temperature before you refrigerate to allow the bottle to carbonate.

Staining & Yeast Viability

Above is a video of a Safale US-05 I got from the bottom of a bottle of a nice Pale Ale a friend of mine brewed. The sample was prepared using the following method and magnified 400x for your viewing pleasure.

Staining is a common practice to ensure the yeast you pitch in your starter are nice and healthy and capable of converting your hard efforts of brewing into the tasty beverage we know as beer. The idea is that healthy yeast will not absorb the stain while non-healthy (non-viable, non-metabolizing) yeast cells will.

"In the brewery industry, the most common yeast viability stain is methylene blue. In fact, methylene blue is accepted as the industry standard.1 However, in recent years, there have been reports that methylene blue stain may overestimate yeast viability.2 This stain has been reported to be inaccurate when yeast viabilities fall below 95%,3  hence, the use of an alternative stain, methylene violet, has been tested by several standard committees as a suitable alternative stain for yeast viability determination.4" - Comparison of the efficacy of various yeast viability stains by Stephen E Szabo  Ph.D.

So in this method I chose Methylene Blue, your mileage my vary in your stain of choice. It's worth noting that the stain that comes in the bottle is VERY concentrated, and in my experience is better served if you take a few drops in a clean vial and dilute it with a few ml of sterile water. This also reduces the intensity of the stain, and could help with the mentioned inaccuracies of staining viable cells.

Start with a clean slide, and a clean slide cover. Place the slide on a clean surface and put the slide cover in place. Then with your inoculating loop get a drop of the yeast slurry you want to examine and place it as indicated above (1) right where the cover and the slide meet. The sample should start to flow from right to left filing the space between the slide and the cover. Next take a dropper of your stain of choice and place it on the left side of the slide (2). The stain should then start to flow into the sample from left to right. I often do the second step while the slide is on the microscope. Watching the stain slowly flow across the sample is pretty neat.

The nice part about doing this method is that you can get a nice mix of intensities of yeast cells (more on the right) and stain (higher on the left) so you get sort of a gradient across the sample equilizing in the center.

Your results, if you have a healthy starter/sample, should be dominated with clear cells.