Ologies with Alie Ward - Zymology (BEER) with Quinton Sturgeon

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

If you like booze, you'll love... fungus! Alie goes Rogue and takes a field trip to a brewery in Newport, OR where she smells vats of bubbling beer slop and learns about the microorganisms that are the workhorses of the brewing industry. Learn about yeasts, how beer is made, the hardest part about being a beer maker, the thick history of beer, some home brewing tips and also a nugget about bungholes. Let's get yeasty.Special thanks to Shannon Feltus and Boni Dutch for the hook-up and the road trip to the coast.More episode sources and linksSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisMusic by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hi. Hi there. It's your weird step-cousin, Ally Ward, rumbling up to the family barbecue in a trans-am and offering you your first room temperature beer. Are you ready to get yeasty? Okay, good. So this episode touches on something that is all over and inside you, devouring your garbage, single-celled fungus that covers every surface of the planet, yeast.

It's also in beer. And I got a hot tip by being alive that people like beer. And so on a recent trip to Portland, I was very generously chauffeured through the woods and to the shore on a road trip by the wonderful sister duo and my own personal merch queens, Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch. And they had an inn at Rogue Brewery in Newport, Oregon. I got a tour and I sat down to chat with a microbiologist and food scientist about zymology, the study and science and practice of fermentation people, which is how you take

a sack of grain and water and turn it into dad's wash-away-the-work-day elixir. Now before I take you on a quick tour, I want to confess two things. Number one, I used to pour beer on myself as a child in the shower. More on that in a minute. Number two, I read all your reviews on iTunes and I silently thank each and every one of you. And this podcast is 100% independently made. A lot of people, I guess, didn't know that.

So listeners pay to keep it going through life-sustaining Patreon donations at patreon.com slash oligies and also by buying merch at oligiesmerch.com and also for supporting for free by rating and reviewing and subscribing on iTunes, which boosts it in the charts. It helps the podcast get seen by other people. So we've remained in the top 30 or so science podcasts, totally independently on iTunes since September. And last week, oligies broke its own download record. It truly means the world to me and this project is my favorite thing I've ever worked on.

So I love that you guys love the show and are spreading the word. So each week I read a snippet of a review that really made my day and Elise1021 said, I love this podcast so much. Some episodes I start listening to and have no interest in the topic. And by the end, I'm so fascinated and intrigued. For example, I almost skipped ichthyology because fish, who cares? And that was my favorite episode to date. Okay, back to zymology.

So the word comes from the Greek naturally for the workings of fermentation. It's pretty straightforward, zymote. And Louis Pasteur was the first zymologist. He was the first person to get the yeasts were making fermentation happen. Oh, also the reason I showered myself in course as a child is because beer was supposed to make hair shiny and I had llama hair and even my parents were like, sure, man, try it. Do whatever you got to do. And it didn't work.

And to be honest, I've never really loved beer, but I have mad respect for the craft of it and the bubbly ichthy science of it. And I'm fascinated by the history and the role that beer plays in good old American culture. So I visited this brewery to find out how beer is made in both small and big scale batches and to chat with someone who is truly deeply knowledgeable about tiny funguses. So amid some forklift, beeping and tasting room hollering in the background, we walked through a maze of like these 20 foot metal tanks storing and fermenting beers. That's a lot of Bruce keys, dude.

We learned some basics. I don't know how familiar you are with home brewing. None, zero. That's basically all the CO2 blow off. So is this fermenting? It's bubbling out. So that's where it burps and farts. Yeah, pretty much.

I sniffed some yeasts. Got some ripe business. And I learned that the staff of this brewery gets to pick their own titles. So I was told this by a guy named Jake who is technically Rogue's level 10 spirits wizard. It's on his business card. He showed me a warehouse of aging whiskeys and charred oak barrels and we won't get into that much in this episode, but I will leave you with a takeaway from him that the opening of a barrel of aging spirits is called the bunghole and they smell delicious.

I wanted a scented candle in the in the flavor of bunghole. Then our group checked out the yeast lab and sat down to a very mellow tasting. Am I going to get blitzed or what? Finally, we went in for the interview and talked about the history of cold ones and how beer goes from a slurry of wet fungus in a bucket to a refreshing cool friend in a bottle and the grossest things you can culture and make into beers. There's some home brewing tips, some food science triumphs and some early names for light beer that just didn't quite cut it.

So get ready to tip back this refreshing episode with zymologist Quentin Sturgeon. Well my first name is John actually, so I go by my middle name. Yeah, my full name is John Quinton Sturgeon. It's not a weak name by any means. No, it's not. Tell me what your title is here. QAQC manager or lead, but my actual title is minister of truth. Did you get to pick that?

It was, yeah, but it was kind of given to me like, yeah, you just don't have a filter. So mister of truth. Is it kind of like a tribal name where it's given to you based on your characteristics? You know, most people pick themselves, so it's like a self-given nickname and it wasn't given to me. Somebody actually mentioned it, so. Every time you're wrong, does that really come back to bite you? I just don't ever be wrong, but no, no, of course.

It doesn't mean I'm correct, it means I'm just telling the truth as best I know it. Your truth. My version of the truth, yes. Now, tell me about your degrees. What did you study? How long did you study it? Yeah, so my bachelor's was in food science at University of Idaho and then I made the epic eight mile track across state border to Washington state and got a master's in

food science. What does that entail, getting a master's in food science? A laborious project that includes everything from sensory to microbiology, a lot of biochemistry at a resurrection old HPLC. What's an HPLC? It's a high performance liquid chromatography machine. The Quentin has two degrees in food science, one a master's, that involved analyzing amino acids in wine fermentation, but he had a history with beer and began home brewing at 19 in

his fraternity's kitchen and he's a burly dude. He's very Pacific Northwest. He's like wearing a hoodie, he's got a beard, those car hearts, pants, and a battered ball cap. The Quittens worked in wheat genetics, cheese, wine, beer, kombucha, all involving in his words one cell critters that nobody cares about. But hello, hi, if you like cheese and beer, you have to care about these critters. They're so important.

So yeast are indeed single celled fungi and it wasn't until the late 1800s after Louis Pasteur that we even knew that a living organism, a fungus, was instrumental in brewing and baking bread. And we put some shit under microscopes, we were like, whoa, huh, well, look at that. Now a common brewer's yeast to make ales in particular is a single round smooth flat cell and it's kind of a cream color. It's called Saccharomyces cervacea, something like that, which translates to sugar fungus of beer.

So not unlike minister of truth, it's a good title. So what is happening? When you walk me through what fermentation is, like just pretend I'm an alien that just landed on the spaceship. And my first question is like, how y'all make booze? Yeah. Well, basically you can chew something up and spit into a bucket or really it's the conversion of sugar and starch will starch goes to sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide.

And that is done by introducing a little tiny single cell critter. Yep. Little fun guy in Saccharomyces and we'd like to use Saccharomyces cervaceae because it's more consistent and not nearly as temperamental and pissy as all the other strains. So that's why you see that Saccharomyces cervaceae as the go to yeast. Is that for wine and for beer and beer, but they are different strains. So how do you choose which strain to use? So that's actually, that was what I did after grad school.

That was 90% of my job was because all, there's all sorts of yeast vendors out there. All these vendors have all this yeast. You don't know what is sales and marketing and what's true. Do you have to culture them and see what eats what and what the byproducts are and what temperatures they can withstand stuff like that? Kind of. Basically the best way to do it, if you're going to be doing like, I think I did 150 something strains when I was there and just over a year in triple kit with little bioreactors

that are temperature controlled, you take sterile juice and you dump in the exact amount of yeast three times and then you ferment it and you track everything you can chemically before and after enduring. And then you try it at the end and basically that's it because you worked off the same juice for all those use strains. You've got the same baseline and all right, this one was farty. That one's awesome. And it's farty is a term.

Is it really? Yeah. I didn't feel fine. It is a nasty. It smells like fart. Do you use that term professionally? Like this one? I have.

It depends on how lax the panel would be, but yeah, I mean everything from rotten cabbage, sewer drain. Oh yeah, sensory terms get fun. Yeah. And how do you... Baby vomit is one that... Baby vomit is another... When you're fermenting something and it smells like baby vomit or cabbage farts or whatever,

are you making notes on smell and compounds? Are you analyzing them through your own senses or a combination of like chemical determinants and your senses? Both. So I mean the human knows, unless you can relate it in sensory terms, it's useless. Right. You tell somebody, all right, cool. You have X and X milligrams per liter of vanilla.

Well, vanilla is one that... Okay, vanilla. That's pretty simple. But you say isophiloric acid, eh? Yeah. What the hell is that? Yeah, exactly. So I mean that's just it.

Yeah, some of these terms when they get just down to chemicals, I don't know, what the hell is that me? Or where did that come from? How do I control it? Is it a good or a bad thing? It gets way too complex when you just do it on the chemistry. So you focus it down into flavor buckets and just make it easy. But sensory, I don't know, your nose is still amazing.

And if you can train yourself to be as good of a machine as possible, setting yourself up pretty well. Side note, isn't it weird how you smell something and it usually reminds you of your past in some way? Like if you huff a perfume, you were freshman year of college, like forget about it. Like you are a slave to nostalgia for the rest of the day. So why is that? Why does that happen?

So I looked it up and smell is linked intimately to parts of the brain that deal with emotion. So you have an olfactory bulb that's part of the limbic system. That includes the amygdala and the hippocampus of the brain. Humans also deal with memory, learning, and your emotions. So in order to identify a smell, you may find that first you have to figure out what is this remind me of before you can figure out what the smell is. So humans have about 6 million olfactory receptors and scientists recently learned that we can smell up to a trillion smells.

But your dog, see your dog over there? Your dog has not 6 million, 300 million compared to our 6 million. So every butt sniff is like Shakespeare to them. I would now like you to imagine a dog in a lab coat because as a food scientist sniffing stuff in this case yeast, super important, dogs would be excellent at this. So when you applied for this particular job, did you come in saying I have a lot of experience testing yeast and they were like we need you on our team? I have enough jack of all trades background to be able to do something like this.

But yeah, a ton of lab and micro experience. So it was like cool, we can shove this guy in there and leave him alone. What's your day to day job like? Oh God, it is literally one third microbiology, one third chemistry, and one third sensory. And then trying to make sure we don't kill anybody by making beer or exploding bottles and that kind of stuff. So if you have the chemistry wrong, your bottles will explode? Not so much the chemistry, the microbiology, because then you've got potential for secondary

fermentation. So when you pop that top, you might shoot a cap into the ceiling or it will just build up so much pressure that the glass itself will shatter. And then yeah, I mean that's the worst, worst, worst case scenario, I don't know if that happening here, so that's good. Can you walk me through the basics of like in an absolute nutshell. How is beer made? So malt is the sugar source, we convert starch into sugars, which the yeast, which we then

later add, chomps up and converts through its own metabolism from glucose and sucrose and maltose into ethanol and carbon dioxide. So then you get basically beer is yeast, farts and piss and other flavorings. Okay, how much do you already love this guy? Now I'm going to recap and give you some basics because I had to look this up after our interview and after the tour because I still didn't get it. I'm going to break it down, you're about to understand how beer is made. Are you ready?

You're never going to look at beer the same way again, and next time you're at a barbecue and you have nothing to talk to anyone about, you can just tell them this, okay cool. So grain like barley or wheat is malted and malted means it's germinated just a wee bit and then it's kilned or heated and that stops the germination. So doing that, germinating it and heating it breaks down some starch into sugar and next it's milled or crushed so that the starches are more accessible and they're easily broken down. Water is then added and when it's added it's called a mash, mashing.

It's added to this big tank called a mash ton and it's mixed with hot water and that activates the enzymes in the grain that helps turn them from starch into sugar and it makes this syrupy sweet liquid called wart. And the wart is separated from all the solids left over in the grain in a process called lottering, so many terms. So the wart is then boiled for a few hours which sterilizes it and hops are added giving it some bitterness, some essential oils, some flavor and this mix is whirlpooled to collect any solids and then it's cooled down.

And finally, after malting, milling, warding, mashing, after all of that it's ready for fungus. This is called pitching. Now the cooled down wart, it's put in this big fermentor tank and yeast is added and it ferments anywhere from a few days to a month depending on the beer and the type of yeast will also determine if it's an ale or a lager. I did not know that. The fermentation really in the bulk of it actually happens in the first 72 hours but

generally we have tank times that range anywhere from 8 days to 20 plus days. And there are hoses that run out the carbon dioxide and it sounds kind of like a rhino farting in a bathtub. Oh, that gurgle is very soothing. And now you have beers, almost. And then basically you remove the yeast if you want and so you get a clear product, a more stable product because of all sorts of biochemistry but it is much more stable than it was before the yeast took effect.

And so it's carbonated up for some good mouthfeel and fizz and there you go. That's beer. It is simple. So you carbonated after the fact? Yeah. Yeah. So a good portion of the carbonation will come from natural fermentation but not enough. It's not that lively bubble pain, bubble break that you experience with beer where soda has

so much more carbonation because you do that. That's a term, it's bubble pain and you feel those like pop rocks, right? Exploding on your tongue? Yeah. That's the kind of thing. I'm literally drinking a LaCroix right now and trying not to burp into the microphone. I was greatly enthused about bubble pain as a term and I looked it up giddily and carbonation does thrill us because it triggers pain receptors on the tongue, the same ones that respond to

like wasabi. Now, some people hate carbonation because it just hurts, they're like, no. But I couldn't find much mention of the specific term bubble pain. I looked it up and I was like, I thought this was a term. Still, I came across an article about it but it was published by a researcher at Quentin's Alma Mater. So it's possible that this term is super common to Quentin in the way that as a Northern California native, I thought everyone said hella all the time.

And so you have to strain off the yeast when you're done fermenting it to where you want it. You use a centrifuge for that? We use our centrifuge, yeah, to just get rid of it and it clarifies the crap out of that beer. In the typical, you'll see a filter beforehand or after to really clarify it and we do pretty well with our centrifuge and we just run with that. What happens to the yeast once you're like later days, thanks?

It goes into a tote and then into a dump vessel. But that's not to say that we haven't pulled off yeast before that and we will reuse that yeast over and over. And so once we start with a little bit, it will grow and grow and grow many, many babies and we harvest that off and use it again. What does it look like? Is it like a murky, I imagine something that looks like murky yellow whale blubber. That's I mean, so you're holding up a bottle of beer.

So it's kind of the it's kind of that murky precipitate in there. Yeah, yeah, it just looks muddy, murky and hazy. Just kind of all sorts of no good. And do different beers use different yeasts or do you use that one? Do you use that one species and genus but a different strain for say a logger IPA? So yeah, we use anywhere from five to upwards of whatever test batches we're doing of random idea beers, strains here at Rogue Pacman is the one we use by far. Anyway, it is a workhorse of a yeast.

It can just power through a huge amount of sugar. But yeah, we definitely use them because they do different things. Some are more phenolic, more Band-Aid, more spice notes, some are more fruity. Others are just clean and neutral. And sometimes you want that. It really depends on the style and what you're trying to go for in the finished product. So Pacman is the name of a special proprietary strain that Rogue uses for a bunch of their beers.

And it's supposed to be really robust and reliable. People love this. I looked online and some people try to use the dregs of other Rogue beers to culture their own Pacman batch. And one message board I looked at said this, Pacman is the most forgiving yeast ever. I had to pitch some slurry that just finished a cider ferment as an emergency measure. And it still got like 80% attenuation in an all grain wort. What?

Okay. So thanks to Quentin, I kind of know what that jargon casserole of a sentence means. So you can buy yeasts. You can try to culture them from other beers. Or if you're like some wild animals, you can just wait for fruit to rot. Evidently, moose and elk eat fallen apples and they stumble around a bit. They get a little crazy. And some monkeys will eat fermented fruit and just lose it.

Elephants however seem to be apocryphal drinkers. It's more legend than lit because it would take so much fruit to get them drunk. But if you've ever brewed kombucha at home or wanted to, the yeast and bacteria form this symbiotic colony. It looks like a slimy pancake or a flap of skin from a dead stingray. And essentially all you need to do is convince a hippie to give you some of their mother slop and you dump it in a bucket of tea and sugar and boom, a few weeks later you have an expensive bucket of fizzy vinegar tea.

I've done this and it filled the void in my life where a pet or an alien in the cupboard should be. It tastes good, but it looks like a nightmare. Do you ever dream about yeast? I haven't lately. Do you have? I have. Yeah.

I mean, I've got a stuffed yeast on my desk. Yeah. Yeah, yeasty. He's a stuffed one million times size of a saccharine cerevisiae and he's got droopy little eyes and he's got budding scars on the head. Well, I guess she and call them mother cells and daughter cells, but yeah, yeasty. When I was separated, we're not separated, but my wife was cross-country. I was interning in California and she was working in New York.

I sent that to her as a care package and she kept it and held it like every night, which you know, it seems really, really weird. I guess I'm just that level of nerd, but I did propose to her after we saw each other that summer. So yeah, yeah, yeah. It was part of your wooing, you're like, here's a stuffed yeast. Think about me. Yeah.

That's cute. Thinking about it. That's kind of weird. No, it's adorable. Did you grow things and culture things when you were a kid? What kind of kid were you? No, I definitely, I had a microscope, but I was kind of like, well, these are like really funny names and hard to remember.

I wasn't all that interested in this, to be honest, I don't know. I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do going in, well, in high school, I don't know. I mowed lawns. I mean, I paid for my undergrad by mowing lawns. Did you really? Oh yeah. I was like 11 years old. My dad's like, hey, you're going to pay for college.

So right there, it says two things aside. Number one, I'm going to college. That's not an option to not, and I was going to pay for it. So all right, cool. 11 year old walks across the street, starts mowing lawns. Where did you put all the money into a banking account? Yeah. Yeah.

Just straight savings and yeah, it was kind of crazy. Are your parents proud of what you do? I think so. That sound in the background is a level 10 spirits wizard cackling at Quentin. Your buddy is laughing at you. I don't know. I haven't heard like, we're proud of you son. You get everyone drunk, make the world a better place.

I'm so proud of you. But you have a laboratory. I do. I do. And a master's. And a master's degree. Yeah. I mean, I don't think they have anything to do.

I think they're more proud of the grandkids I've given them. Did your wife wish that she could just butt off a baby like a yeast? Yeah. The pregnancy was rough. That's not, it wasn't fun. She had it delivered to you like a champ, but oh yeah, like poster child. But no, pregnancy was rough. Yeah.

It was beer helpful afterward. She's not a big drinker. She's not. Your wife is not a big drinker. She's not a big drinker. When she does, it's more the sour tart stuff, which I mean, she can peel and eat a lemon. I know that's the face I make when she does it. It's like, this unbelievable good God, I just hear your enamel screaming.

But no, it's something that we started making a Paradise Pucker, which is a sour base and she loves that beer, but she's just not a huge drinker. So yeah, there's that. What are you? I know, right? I'm going to ask you some questions from listeners, is that cool? Yeah. Okay.

Because there's approximately one million of them. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Allergies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, Allergies Gives Back.

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This is a rapid fire round. Greg wants to know any secret yeasts that might make for better fermenting beers? Try everything you can from wherever you can get it. There's a lot at places at home brew stores. Or try colching your own. See what's growing out. Yeah, see what happens. What's the worst?

You just make a terrible batch of beer and then you dump it, clean everything and start over. Well, how do you know that you even have yeast? You just put, you put the wort out and see what happens? Well, there, I mean a couple of steps. Like you can easily get the stuff to get your own Peter dish set up and just to start culturing. I mean, you can be into it for less than 50 bucks.

Whoa. Yeah. I mean, you just need a couple of glassware and you just make a small little batch of wort, set it out in an orchard or something like that and throw it on some dishes. I mean, there's some technique to it, but it's not impossible. Wow. DIY yeast. It's a thing.

Bob Ogden wants to know. When and where did hops come from in brewing? Are hops used for any other purpose? Do we even use hops? What are hops doing on the rest of the time? Good question. Well, I guess they're kind of an offshoot of hemp. And so I believe they were at one point used for rope along those lines.

They're also like a subset of like pot. Really? I think they're somehow related to marijuana, but I don't, you don't have to fact check me on that one. So hops, aka humulus lupulus, I think that's what they're called. And marijuana are indeed related, but instead of getting you all stony baloney, hops were cultivated for use in beer as early as the ninth century because they have these acids and essential oils that prevent spoilage.

They also give beer that traditional bitter taste that a lot of people who are not me like. And now an okay time to tell you I've never finished a beer. Maybe once I finished a beer, I've started a lot of beers, but I really appreciate the craftsmanship. Adrienne McNichols wants to know, is it true that stouts and porter are good sources of dietary item, i.e. is my beer health food? There was a guy who lived off nothing but Guinness for a month.

And it's totally doable. Yeah, especially unfiltered because you have the pro and prebiotics of yeast. Okay. So yeah, I mean, people have done it. It's got a ton of nutrients in there. It's got to be doing something weird to your system after a while. Did he take a sabbatical from pooping? What was the deal there?

I don't know. I don't know. It's like you're on a juice diet. You're not getting a lot of fiber that way. Yeah, that's a good point. It's all pure liquid. Interesting. Who was this guy?

Was this someone you knew? Or was there some guy? No, no. This is not Larry from my freshman year. Okay. I've heard this. I don't know. It's a thing.

Oh, I'll find him. Oh, yeah. So the Guinness diet is a thing. And though I found accounts of one super devout Christian slash beer lover giving up food in favor of beer for 40 days of Lent, I guess he was inspired by monks, he did not seem to be drinking Guinness per se. So with a Guinness diet, with a stout, you'd need to drink 47 pints of Guinness a day to get your caloric needs met.

This was calculated by a 170 pound dude who tried it. Plus, to fulfill your daily nutritional requirements, you would need to drink a glass of orange juice for vitamin C and two glasses of milk for calcium. So I looked up records of people who've tried this and one account which ran in a newspaper article in the Sonoma Sun contained a diary from which I will read an excerpt. Day three. At one point, after enough people told me that I look like I'm dying, it all became clear.

I know what hell is. Hell is a giant party where you can drink all the Guinness you want, but only your friends can eat the delicious feast and they will laugh at you and they will constantly make comments like, you look like you're dying. Another man tried the Guinness diet and reported that after having a couple of lunch beers, quote, my stomach was starting to make noises comparable to the dragons on Game of Thrones. Now it should be noted that both dudes who wrote their trials up of this broke down around day four or five and ravenously purchased and bought candy bars.

One was a Snickers and one was a Mars bar. So unless you are deeply alcoholic or religious, you may want to just do like slim fast or step up the cardio buddy. Caitlin Thomas wants to know, why does beer have to have so many carbs? Well, that's the whole idea between that light and beer, right? You're trying to get those carbs out. It's just a matter of what you use your sugar source and what's going to be left over the yeast is not going to consume.

And so it's one of those factors. If you want to have less carbs in your beer, you got to use a yeast strain and set it up that it's going to ferment out pretty dry. But at the same time, carbs are a complete balance of all the other flavors. So without carbs, you're just going to have a boozy, watered down, unbalanced hot mess. Yeah, like that is totally, they're necessary. I mean, it's the sugar. It's all the sweet and a lot of the multi biscuit flavor.

It's all from the mall and the carbs. Do light beers, have they been fermenting longer or do they just add water to a regular beer? It's a different sugar source. So it ferments out cleaner and so you end up having just more ethanol and more CO2. So it's more efficiently converted. Okay. I mean, there's a lot of other technology into it.

But I mean, so that's why it was a big thing when it hit the market. I think Miller light was the first one. Yeah. I said, yeah, like I knew what he was talking about, but I did not know. However, after doing some light Googling, I have learned that this beer Miller light was invented in 1967, but was originally called Gabblingers diet beer. So they tweaked the marketing because I mean, it was pretty revolutionary to actually be able to have a beer around a hundred calories.

Right. I love it. Like make a lobe ultras. Like if you like CrossFit and beer, like, okay, no, I'm sorry, those, you don't exist. So, I mean, Crisara wants to know what ingredient is it that makes the yeast occasionally go seemingly crazy and foam up and explode during first fermentation, asking for a friend. Also, do you have any tips for new brewers or book recommendations? Yeah.

So that explosive early fermentation, we have it. I mean, we'll blow over our tubs and we use 55 gallon drums as our blow off. But it depends largely on how much protein was in the initial fermentation and then how much yeast they added. And if they added just too much, your fermentation just went crazy. And that yeast is just really, really, really active. So there's a couple of ways to get around that is get a bigger vessel, so all that foam breaks off or just stays in the vessel or don't add as much yeast or keep it in a bathtub

with some ice. Chill it down. I mean, during fermentation, there's a lot of heat generated as well. So you have to chill that down. Otherwise, it will just run off and go real fast. Is it better to homebrew if you're new at it during the winter months than in the summer? Oh, I don't know. If you've got an inkling to do it at all, just do it.

But I mean, as far as going back to the tips for homebrew sanitation, you've got to be clean. And if you think you're clean, do it again. I've had so much bad homebrew because they didn't clean something properly or they, oh, well, no, I just ran bleach through it. No? That's a no. Well, it's just not enough.

I mean, you got to do it right. What happens if you don't brew it clean? Does it start to, does the wrong thing ferment? Does it smell skunky? Okay. So you set yourself up for anything and everything to have access to all that sugar, all those free amino acids, and they're going to go crazy. So that's why Sacromycesia was started to use because it's such an active fermenter.

It'll just attack and it'll drive out and out compete most other things. So that's why it's really, really beneficial to use a good, healthy yeast, but sanitation. Yeah, it's kind of key because you don't want like an acetobacter. Acetobacter makes acetic acid, which is vinegar or like a lactic acid bacteria or pediococcus, which makes lactic acid, which is not as tart, but it still will ruin a beer. And it's like sour milk is pediococcus, pediococcus. It's on my shit list. Get out of here, pediococcus.

Yeah. Are you clean at home? Are you a neat freak at home? Or are you like... I'm not. No. The worst is the kitchen sink and my wife will rip, and she does, totally rip me anyone. And it is the dirtiest place in your house.

Oh, say it isn't so. No. Okay. So I have often heard and feared this about kitchen sinks and I had to look it up well. And according to Dr. Charles Gerba, one microbiologist who's been studying invisible American domestic filth for decades, your sink and sponge are like Bonnaroo, a witch's brew of fecal bacteria, protozoans, and viruses. So he says that the cleanest looking kitchens are often the dirtiest because clean people

wipe up so frequently, it's like painting a swath of bacteria like Bob Ross laying down the background of a gorgeous landscape. Now amusingly, some of the cleanest kitchens, Dr. Gerba claims, are in the homes of bachelors who rarely wipe up their countertops. He says, in most cases, it's safer to make a salad on a toilet seat than it is to make one on a cutting board. So what are we supposed to do? Well, you can either microwave your sponge for a few minutes and kill all that stuff,

or you can survive off beer and snickers. I'm going to leave it up to you. But in your lab... I'm in the lab, yeah. It's a completely different story. So I get all my neat freak out of my system here and then go home and just like a slob. Oh, God, that would drive me crazy because it's be like, I know you have a master's in science.

Like I know you know how to wash these dishes. Megan Gerard wants to know, I heard that we have found ancient civilizations had beer recipes. Do we know if that was because they couldn't prevent it, like there was no refrigeration, or do they do it on purpose? Are they any good? Ancient beer, I understand, was because the water was so disgusting that they're like, we got to have this stuff that has alcohol in it so we can kill the bacteria.

Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, I actually do really, you help yourself out from killing things like endobacter e.coli. Side note, them bacteria is poo. That kind of stuff because it can't survive in that low pH. It can't survive with a little bit of alcohol in there. Hops were added way after the fact. I mean, we're talking beer, 4,000 years old at least.

We haven't know what the hell we were doing except until Pasteur came by. They're like, oh wait, no, this is not just God blessing you with this alcohol. It's no, it's yeast. It's yeast piss and farts. That's what you get. It's a little tiny, single cell fart in this. But I don't know, I have heard of some people trying to recreate really ancient beers and then kind of being so-so, but you're also kind of like, I don't really know how they

did it. Okay, so a little beer history. It could have been invented up to 10,000 years ago when agriculture was first starting out around Mesopotamia. And bread yeasts were fermented into this drinkable, potable, I guess I use that loosely, concoction. So early beers were often really thick, like more of a gruel, like a soupy oatmeal. And drinking straws were used so that you wouldn't get the chunky bits. How gross is that?

According to Wikipedia though, in ancient Mesopotamia, the majority of brewers were probably ladies. Brewing was a fairly well respected occupation during the time. And then at some point it became less chunky and I guess more manly from a societal standpoint. Brian Edge wants to know, is it true that there's a hops shortage or an impending one? And if so, what effect would that have on the brewing industry? There certainly was. I think, was it Yakima?

Six, ten years ago, somewhere in that range, one warehouse had, I think, one-third of the entire United States hop harvest in just the one building and it burnt down. Oh my God! So overnight, everyone's scrambling and hosed. Yeah, so that immediately bumped beer prices up and they just have never really gone down. How insane is that? Okay, well, evidently it happened again just this past December in another hop's warehouse in Yakima.

Now, before you open up your own arson investigation detective agency, apparently these things just happen. Acids in the hops break down and the hops heat up to the point where they just burst into flames. So things like this are why beer can cost you some money. Is it cheaper to brew your own beer? Yeah, totally. It depends on what you throw into it.

If you're throwing in rice syrup solids, as your base fermentable, that's fairly cheap. But you're not going to get a lot of flavor out of that. And so you get what you pay for and you get what you pay to put into it too. PJ Anderer wants to know, what's happening to a beer when I bury it in my yard and wait to drink it for several years? It's probably not going to taste all that good. It's just because the aging cycle, it's not good. Time is not good to beer.

Okay. There's a couple of places that on the label is best yesterday, which is totally true. The best way to have the best beer is to keep it cold and drink it fast. Some beers are meant to age, like a barley wine. So I did not know what barley wine was. I pretended to during the interview, but I just looked it up and it's technically a beer. It just has such a high alcohol concentration, like 8% to 12% that it's called a wine.

So barley wine, it's barley wine. We did a flight of barley wine, our old crusty. I think the oldest bottle we opened was 20 years old and we jumped every four years. So good. Okay. It was so good. But that's on purpose. That was totally on purpose.

Yeah. Yeah. If you bury it in your yard, you're going to have incredible temperature fluctuations. Hell, if it freezes, come on, just shatter that bottle. That's a good point. Yeah. So that would be my concern on that one. All right.

So no buried treasure. Jude, Kenny wants to know, is there a particular region in the US that's favorable for open fermentation? Like, are there better airborne yeast in certain regions? No. Well, yeah, it depends on what is around you. I mean, if you're by orchards and a lot of agriculture, there's just a lot more stuff on those leaves, especially yeast.

No. So I mean, if you're near a vineyard, there's a ton of yeast that lives outside of grapes on the surface of them. That stuff's going to get flown off in the wind. And so you got a better chance of at least getting a yeast, but... Capturing good ones? Yeah. Well, also bad ones.

So that's a mixed bag. Oh, that's risky. It is super risky. I mean, open fermentations are very... They're just risky, because you don't know what you're going to get. And you're also going to get a lot of bacteria. Okay. Quick aside.

In 2013, Rogue Brewery was looking to make a beer with a wild yeast, and they tried some open fermentations and some nearby orchards, but didn't come up with much. They were like, eh. So it's a semi-joke. They tried to culture some yeast using 12 beard hairs of their brewmaster. This wild yeast, the wildest of yeasts, really ended up being a pretty good fit to culture. And genetically, they found out it was a hybrid between the brewery's Pac-Man yeast and some new strain.

So they made a beer out of it. They put the beer in the market, and people liked it, saying it had a sweet, bready, pineapple-y and oddly olive-like notes. So the idiom to get a wild hair will never be the same to me. You can open ferment or try wild strains. It just might not be for beginners. Is it better to get a kit and try to culture something and see what happens? It is.

Definitely if you're just getting started by something that's already cultured, and that way you can't really screw it up. Okay. You can. Start slow. But yeah, get into it. And then to culture your own yeast, that's like just jumping in. That's a couple of steps.

In general, near and orchard would be a good place for open fermentation. Oh, thanks. Okay. Yeah. Carrie Stewart wants to know, do craft brewers maintain their own hops and yeast strains like proprietary blends, or are they sourdough starters that get passed around and shared among other brewers? So you can buy Pac-Man.

Pac-Man? Yeah, you can actually go buy the yeast that we use from the majority of our beers and use it in a home brew. Yeah, but it is something that we definitely use. Others, I think Beard was the only one that was proprietary. We don't do that here, but a lot of breweries will, and they will make their own yeast and keep it completely in-house. They'll go from frozen culture all the way to pitch and use that and never have to buy

yeast from anywhere else. So remember, to pitch just means to add yeast. This is so many terms, but now you can throw them around like you know what they mean. Old word over here will not blow your cover. Sarah Nichelle Welch wants to know, why do beers have different percentages of alcohol to them? Different styles, it's appropriate, and it will match better with the flavor and profile the balance of it.

So some will have a little bit more malt, and that can handle a little more alcohol or a little more sugar. That can handle more alcohol. It does change up the mouth feel as well. And then, so mouth feel is the viscosity, and bubble pain is the carbonation. Yeah. These are good terms. Any other weird terms that I should know about?

Let's see, drinkability. What the hell does that mean? Exactly. See, that's why I had to take it off the sensory form, because everyone kept like, well yeah, I could pound six of these. That's not what that means. So drinkability does not mean poundability, but rather what is the arc of the beer when you first take a sip, and then when it warms up a little on your tongue, and then the lingering

aftertaste. And is it all good? Great. That's drinkability. So while editing this, I started to imagine that Quentin was a muppet. I think his voice learns itself well to muppetness. Just picture it. He has a high degree of listenability.

When you're having to test beers for your job, are you spitting them, or are you getting hammered at two in the afternoon for one? Well, good call in the time. That's actually when we do it. No, we only give two ounces, and six samples, well, eight samples at max, so at most you've got 10 ounces, and you're not getting hammered. Okay. Everybody walks around here annihilated afterwards, and there's always spit cups.

You always have to give spit cups just in case. Just in case. Someone wants to. Just in case. Seems insulting. Stefan Titus wants to know, how do you keep your records organized, and are you a naturally organized person? We did talk about your cleanliness, but do you have logbooks?

What's happening? So how do you keep track of millions of yeast pets, or I guess livestock, if you want to look at them that way? Yeah, no, so it depends on, every company does it a little different, we're still on the Excel paper. Okay. And we definitely want to get away from that as soon as possible, because it is kind of a nightmare of this Excel file labeled this, and yada yada, I mean, Excel is great for

what it does. It's not a good database. Yeah. It can't handle a lot of data. But databases on your Christmas list. Lab Information Management System is on my wish list. Caitlin Plate wants to know, are food scientists common to find working in breweries, or is it still overrun by a lot of engineers?

She's a future food scientist who would love a job at a brewery. Fishing. Smiley face. You know, actually, there's more and more universities actually coming out with specific brewing programs. Oh. Yeah. When I was going to undergrad, I really wasn't thinking of brewing right off the gate.

I was thinking of med school, and then I realized I didn't like people that much. And then I was like, all right, what am I going to do with a microbiology degree? And so I hopped into food science, because I just, you could be an ice cream scientist. Come on. Do you want to do that? Hell yeah. Somebody's got to do that. Actually, ice cream is really complex as a food base.

It is a good jack of all trades degree. To do food science, you've got physics, microbiology, chemistry, and just a lot of sensory. So you can kind of walk in to anywhere. Oh, this is a good question about selecting a beer. Becca wants to know, with a vast number of beers these days, how do I navigate them all? My BF, either best friend or boyfriend, and I were talking last night, and he said there are too many beers. So much is good that nothing is standing out anymore.

So how does one make choices in this oversaturated market of local breweries, micro-breweries, and limited editions? Too much of a good thing? What's to be done? Pick a brewery. Oh. Just stick there. Yeah.

Rogue has everything you need. Getting aside, both Jake and Quentin essentially say, try to fund the local guys. That's one angle. Two more questions. What do you hate about your job, or your life, or brewing, or yeast, or is there a certain moment of your day, or is there a thing, or fuck this? Yeah, there's one moment. Every damn morning, when I show up, and I have to open the incubator and look at those

Peter dishes, we got anything? Yeah. Yeah, I hope not. I mean, it really, basically the way I set up the quality program, if something grows, it probably shouldn't have been there, unless it was the yeast we were looking for. And that's when we were making the bearded yeast, or bearded beer. That bastard, it was technically a wild yeast. And so, it was resistant to all the plates I would put it on.

If I didn't know exactly what it looked like, that crusty little bastard, I would have a freak out, like a conifption fit, like we've got a wild yeast, and it's gone through the package line, and oh my God, every gasket in the building is going to have to be completely replaced, and we're going to be shut down for weeks, and I'd have that little moment. By the time something grows on a Peter dish, it could be in North Carolina. So for quality control, which is a huge part of Quentin's job, he has to keep reference samples of every batch. It goes into a bottle, or can, so he can verify, in case they do have an issue with one.

So they have an area of the brewery that's like a library of beers, and they have samples of a bunch of recent brews in the lab. So when you open up that thing, you're just hoping, it's like anxiety. Yeah, I don't want to smell anything funky. That's for damn sure. One of the things that might be funky is something called for ethylphenol, which is created by a spoilage yeast. What does that smell like?

Poop. Okay. There's so many reasons why you don't want to smell that in the morning. Or baby vomit, or a proetanomyces is a really, really bad one, because it's just a bugger to get rid of if we ever had it. It's horse blanket, and Band-Aid, and barnyard. Oh. Yeah, it's a whole bunch of bad, and it has shut down wineries.

So I mean, there's a hit list of crap I don't want to ever see in this brewery. That's one of them. Yeah, it's on my shit list. What's the best part of your job? The complete randomness of the day. Well, I mean, I've got it structured. So when it is danned out, that's really, really awesome, but I never know what new project can throw at me.

So I get pulled in all sorts of different directions, and I kind of have to be the master of all around here. I think what it's trying to say is that he likes the variety, even though it's part. I asked the level 10 spirits wizard, Jake Halshew, and he said that the coolest thing about being a distiller is when he hosts a cocktail event or a whiskey release, and he gets to see a whole room of people enjoying themselves as part of the fruits of his labor, or I guess the spoiled fruits of his labor put in a good way. He says that's more rewarding for me than drinking himself.

Although Jake also referenced that meme, this is what my friends think I do, this is what my parents think I do, this is what I actually do, and he says what he actually does is clean. He says whenever you look at brewing or distilling, controlling yeast and bacterial growth is so important that brewers are almost just glorified dishwashers. I'm going to quote him directly. He said, I mean, we just clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, sanitize, clean, and then we clean, then we sanitize, and clean, and then we sanitize.

Quentin of course echoed this fact of zymology. I don't know if you're aware of this, but 90% of a brewer's job is cleaning stuff. I just heard that. It is totally true. Industry-wide turnover is pretty high, because everyone's like, I'm going to work at a brewery and I'm going to make beer. Somebody's got to clean those kegs, somebody's got to make the cardboard box, and otherwise the whole thing collapses.

You can never complain about working too hard because somebody else is doing another really hard job, especially around here, because yeah, you are cleaning stuff, you're removing stuff. You're not just kicking back on a porch drinking beer all day. If you had any advice for someone who wants to be a professional brewer or a professional food scientist, in general, what's the most important piece, and then I'll let you go since I've been asking you 1 million questions. Last week I was here 15 hours on Friday, so don't worry about it.

Get into a lab or get into whatever you think you're going to do as soon as possible. Find out what your passion is. Get involved as soon as possible. Will you ever call yourself a zymologist? I think you should start. I don't know. I love that you can call yourself the minister of truth or wizard, but as a zymologist is a stretch.

I don't know. Well, you're the most knowledgeable zymologist I've ever met, so cheers to that. Thank you so much for being on. No, no, no. I'm glad we can nerd out. Cheers to yeast. Yeah, absolutely. And everything else in there.

Don't say that. To see photos of me and Quentin Sturgeon, you can head to my Instagram at oligies. The podcast is also on Twitter at oligies, and I'm on both as Allie Ward with 1L. Thank you so much to Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch again for hooking this interview up and driving me to Newport and hanging out and getting Dutch Brothers Coffee and Burgers and to Jay Kolshu and Quentin Sturgeon for the fungus chats and the really memorable we'll never forget tour. Thank you also to everyone for supporting on Patreon.

Again, it's an independent podcast, and you can become a patron for as little as $0.25 an episode, and you can have your questions asked to theologists. Plus, you can see more photos from the rogue tour, and I put up videos every once in a while to say hi. You can also support the podcast by getting yourself some oligies merch, like some awesome shirts and hats and totes and pins. That's at oligiesmerch.com. You can join up with other oligites in the Facebook group.

Thank you to Ernie and Hannah for admitting, and thank you as always to Stephen Ray Morris for doing a bang up job editing as I record these asides several days later than usual because I was traveling for a family emergency. My folks were stuck in a bit of a blizzard up north, and I got hella behind. Thank you again so much for listening. If you like the podcast, you can always support for free by rating and reviewing on iTunes that helps so much. And please do remember, just ask smart people dumb questions, you guys.

Because if you're curious, it's never a dumb question, and someone else is probably wondering the exact same thing. It is like, ugh, I'm so glad you asked. And as a thank you for sticking it through to the credits, I usually reward you with one heinous secret from my life, and I'm going to tell you two. Number one, I love eating smoked oysters from a can. I think they're good. I love them.

And two, the last few houses and apartments I've lived in. I've written notes, and I've tucked them into hidden places, and I always wonder when someone will find them. And I hope at least a decade goes by. Because if you find a two-month-old, wistful, farewell note, it's kind of embarrassing. If you're pulling away the moving truck and the new tenant finds this, it's the year 2018, and I used to live here, note with still wet ink tucked behind a cupboard, that's just embarrassing. But I do wonder if anyone's found any of the notes I've hidden in any of the apartments

or houses I've lived in. And I also wonder if there are any notes lurking behind any weird floorboards around me right now. Wasn't that weird? Have you ever done that? Anyway, okay. 00:53:32,740 --> 00:53:33,740 Thank you.