The Yeast of my worries

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Re: The Yeast of my worries

Unread postby EllenJ » Tue Oct 20, 2009 4:08 pm

Folks, don't none of you understand? You'll never be able to explain the function of yeast in a fermenting tank until you break free of the Great American Winner/Loser Concept. Good/Bad, Right/Wrong, Ebony/Ivory, Red State/Blue State, Conservative/Liberal, Nazi/Commie (except in the case of the Limbaugh/Palinites who can't seem to distinguish any difference).

When talking with someone who has a solid grasp on a black and white issue, how do you discuss shades of orange?

Whatever led you believe there's either NO yeast in the fermenter, or there's whatever yeast the distiller PUT into the fermenter? A vat full of water and fermentable grain sugar is very much like our own planet. It is teeming with yeast and bacteria, whole communities of them, each trying to grab hold of a piece of real estate, declare it "home", raise kids, and support their own soccer team. They consume the consumables, and they excrete their excretables. And each culture consumes different elements of the mash; and they excrete differently, too. Have you ever visited a foreign country? I mean, beyond the airport and the local Conte Naste resort complex? Cultures that eat foods that smell, well, diffently from what our food smells like also, uh... well there is certainly a different "air" about foreign cultures.

What the distiller (who is actually wearing his brewer's hat at this point) is doing with his "house yeast" is trying to dominate the "Fermenter Tank World" with a particular culture, so as to influence the total aroma/taste of the the effluent to fit a profile he wants to produce. There are several ways he can do this, some of which eliminate the differences and other that utilize the complexities they make available. Which method he chooses will have have a dramatic influence on the outcome.

(1) He can simply add a whole bunch of his own yeast all at once and hope that will crowd out all the others. It will almost certainly overwhelm bacteria (yeast is lots stronger than bacteria), but will probably be only partially successful in eliminating other yeasts. Still, if the dosage is sizeable enough, the end product will smell and taste more like the house yeast's doo-doo than like any of the others.

(2) He can ENSURE that his own yeast's flavor/aroma contribution is the only one by using sanitation and sterilization practices that eliminate all yeast cultures and prevent any but his own from taking hold anywhere in the tank. Since this also has the advantage of being the accepted production standard for food-grade products in most countries today, it is the one most commonly chosen for whiskey production as well. Never mind that it produces the same effect as replacing the "carmine", "scarlet", "cherise", "hot magenta, "radical red", and "razzamatazz" colors in a Crayola box with just "red". After all, if we still use the same labels, the kids won't know the difference.
Well, maybe at least THEIR kids won't.

(2) He can carefully add SOME of his own yeast, not all at once, but in stages, perhaps at particular temperatures in the process. Maybe some needs to be added to the northwest quadrant when the tank is half full, with more added to the southwest area when its nearly to the top. Done that way, the end result can be a concert of different yeast effluence, with the dominant note being the house yeast and much of the layered complexities resulting from the contribution of other strains.

I'll leave it to y'all to figure out (or eternally disagree about; or probably both) which of those any given distiller uses (or used to, anyway, back when he or his father had a choice)
=JOHN=
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Re: The Yeast of my worries

Unread postby cowdery » Tue Oct 20, 2009 10:41 pm

I can't speak for micros, but the majors essentially do John's (1) and (2), but not (3). They all do everything practical to control the micro-organism community within their fermenters and leave almost nothing to chance. Yes, any mixture of sugar and water will attract yeast and ferment, and a few types of beverage alcohol makers in the world leave a lot of that to chance, but the people who make Our Favorite Drink don't.
- Chuck Cowdery

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Re: The Yeast of my worries

Unread postby Leopold » Wed Oct 21, 2009 1:04 pm

Well, I do all of them. The last method is reserved for special bottlings, like the Rye that I've started. One of the nice things about my brewing background are my experiences working and studying in Germany. Because of the German Purity Law, I have quite a bit of practical knowledge with working with Lactobacillus (German breweries must make their own acidified mash/wort for pH adjustment). Controlled "spoilage" can add quite a bit of character to a spirit. Controlling foreign yeast or bacteria is quite difficult in my experience...but well worth the trouble.
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Re: The Yeast of my worries

Unread postby EllenJ » Wed Oct 21, 2009 2:13 pm

When the grain, especially corn, arrives at the distillery, it is immediately unloaded into the storage hoppers. Nothing is done to sterilize the corn kernels, and when they are milled and dumped into the mash fermenters they bring along with them huge doses of whatever natural yeasts and bacteria are native to wherever the corn was grown. In many cases, that would represent many different farms and fields in Kentucky, Indiana, maybe even Nebraska and Missouri.

This corn is added to boiling mash water, which is necessary in order to cook it. In some cases, the corn is cooked in pressure cookers at even higher temperatures. Neither rye nor barley require such cooking, nor can either of them tolerate those temperatures without losing their ability to ferment. So before anything more can be done the scalded corn must be cooled down to 70 or 80 degrees. In modern distilleries, this is accomplished fairly quickly through the use of cold water circulating through cooling coils, but in the classic days it often meant letting the corn mash sit overnight. On the following day the scalded corn meal, which is then found to be caked and of the consistency of cold mush, is broken up by hand and thinned down with cold water. At this stage of the process whatever rye or wheat meal is being used can be added without being scalded, followed by the malted barley which provides the diastase to convert the starches to fermentable sugars.

And all the while that hot slop is cooling through the hundreds and the nineties temperatures, those "imported" yeasts are happily setting up housekeeping, battling enemy bacteria forces and each other, getting their G.I. Bill college degrees and having kids. And grandkids. And so on. By morning, that whole fermenter tank is riddled with little yeasty townships and subdivisions and school districts. Not to mention religion, franchised sports, and internet forums discussing the relative merits of glucose and fructose vs disaccharides.

In the morning come the raiding hordes of Attila The Beam or The Great Red Star. By way of both their sheer numbers (not unlike the baby boom to which most of us belong) and their superior adaptability for what is, after all, a highly-controlled "natural" environment, the house-induced yeasts quickly and permanently declare their dominance. Established colonies of bacteria and other yeasts are either eliminated or subdued and the fermentation proceeds as planned.

My point in this little metaphor is that the better bourbons (i.e., better than the same distiller seem to be making today) are those where there are still elements of other yeasts left in the mash when it hits the column. Like Chuck, I doubt that any of the larger distillers do (3) anymore, at least not intentionally. In fact, it's probably illegal to produce any foodstuff (such as whiskey) without being able to prove perfect sanitation practices to the FDA or the EU-whatever-is-its-equivalent. And to that extent, I believe we have lost some of the complexities and "layers" that were once part of our favorite potion. Then again, I also think there are two factors that lend encouragement, and maybe even Hope We Can Believe In:

(A) New, small distillers are willing, and often able, to use processes not available to large corporate facilities who need to answer to many regulatory agencies, as well as disinterested accountants.

(B) Whiskey folks have always been quite adept at finding ways to step around regulations that would put them out of business. While I'm certain that no one will confirm even knowledge of (3), that doesn't mean that they have always been 100% successful in trying to prevent it.

Maybe it's those damned angels again? :drunken:
=JOHN=
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Re: The Yeast of my worries

Unread postby delaware_phoenix » Wed Sep 29, 2010 7:38 am

While there's lots of wild yeast and bacteria on the grains and the environment of a mash or wort seems just as conducive to their growth as the commercial yeast, there are factors that end up favoring the commercial yeast by a large margin. pH is one. Yeast can grow well down at pH 4 and most bacteria cannot. Yeast have both aerobic and anaerobic lifestyles while bacteria have only one. So once the yeast consume the oxygen they can start making alcohol and the others die.

In brewing, there's a phase at the end of the process where the wort is boiled in order to kill any remaining organisms and reduce/eliminate competition/off-flavors. In distilling, the boiling happens after the ferment.

My first ferment of a full bushel batch ended up starting spontaneously and at a much warmer temperature than I wanted. Came in the next morning to a foot tall krausen :shock: There's some interesting aromas. But I'll run it anyway to see what happens. Might end up being good, so you never know.
Cheryl Lins - Proprietor and distiller, Delaware Phoenix Distillery, Walton, NY
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Re: The Yeast of my worries

Unread postby Elijah » Thu Jan 30, 2014 6:50 am

Wow. Thank you all for this amazing conversation. I'm just starting my head first dive into american whiskey, (have my first 2L barrel of BT mash1 going) and have a few leads on friends of friends with access to stills, this is without a doubt going to be my next researching obsession.
Best,
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