Yeast Wrangling: Part II

My efforts at collecting some yeast from the air in my back yard was unsuccessful to say the least.  All the plates I made were covered with various types of bacteria and other microbes as you can see in the picture below.  There were a couple spots that looked like they could be yeast, but inoculating two starters with them yielded very little if any growth and they smelled bad, so I knew they weren't yeast.  Or if they were yeast, they weren't any yeast I'd want to put in my beer.  I'm going to try this again some day, except next time I will take the suggestion of a friend and use some locally grown fruit as my source rather than try to collect the yeast from the air.  It won't be back yard local, but it will be local enough for me.

This was one I thought might be yeast.  Note to self: that's not what yeast looks like on an agar plate.

New Hop Grower

This year, for the first time, I will be joining the illustrious ranks of hop growing home brewers.  I just pre-ordered my rhizomes from Adventures in Homebrewing and I am incredibly excited.  They won't be shipping out the rhizomes until April and I just can't wait.  I ordered rhizomes for three varieties: Centennial, Cascade and Willamette.  Of the three Centennial is the only hop I haven't used all that much in my brewing.  I hope to change that after the harvest by brewing a wet hopped IPA that uses all three varieties.  Stay tuned because I'll be posting more updates on the hop growing starting when I receive the rhizomes in the mail which should be in mid-April.  Until then I'll be covering many other beer and brewing related topics.

My next post should be a detailed report of my experience at my BJCP tasting exam on Saturday Jan. 19.  I'm incredibly excited and nervous about this exam.  Throughout my life, for any given exam, I never feel like I've prepared enough, but there's not much I can do with so little except study the guidelines, so I will just have to have faith in my palate.  I will report my experience for everyone to learn from.