So you may have noticed SYD sitting here kind of quiet all week, but there was definitely a good excuse. Sunday was my presentation of the technical topic, yeast. I spent a healthy portion of my week’s free time working on a handout and Power Point presentation on the all-important single celled organism we use to make beer, bread, and lots of other good stuff.
Prior to my presentation, we played guess that beer and I did well enough to get it down to the country of origin — America, and the style — Imperial or Double IPA, but I couldn’t quite identify the hop variety, which turned out to be Simcoe. Not a bad beer. Then we had our first “identify the defect” scenario. Les brought in two growlers of the same beer, and we had to guess the style and then identify the defect. The beer was a clone he’d done with C.R.A.B.S. of Wharf Rat’s Best Bitter. One of the growlers had a beer that was SERIOUSLY affected by an overabundance of diacetyl. It tasted like an extremely buttery bag of Snyder’s pretzels, or toffee. Not really a bad flavor in my mind, just definitely way beyond what the style guidelines for a Best Bitter allow as far as butterscotch notes are concerned.
I felt like I did a fair job with my presentation, though I did mix up one term that I’ll have to correct for the class website. The majority of my presentation got into some pretty technical turf — at least the hand-out I spent 4 hours writing up did.
One of the things I wasn’t totally aware of that the class discussion following my presentation brought up was using olive oil instead of oxygenating a starter. This is something I’m definitely excited to try out. The basics of the process involve replacing the yeast’s need for fatty acids during its growth phase. Normally, yeast synthesizes these fatty acids from amino acids in the wort, and the dissolved oxygen from the aeration. Supposedly, with literally just a drop of olive oil from the head of a pin, that process of synthesis is eliminated, and no oxygen need be introduced at any point during fermentation. (more…)