In the beginning, there was fire. Fast forward many years, and there is still fire. And I personally like harnessing the power of fire for cooking, warmth, beauty and sundry other purposes. I especially like harnessing fire in the form of rapidly oxidizing wood.
To that end, I began foraging firewood in my local park. Fallen dead branches, etc. On one occasion, while foraging firewood, I found a particularly dry, cracked and weathered log (this detail will be significant later), and it was beautiful to boot. Gnarled and twisted, much like a piece of driftwood. I took it home with the intent to burn it, but as I considered it, I thought, "This log is too beautiful to burn. Perhaps I'll make a decorative piece out of it. Lacquer it or something." So, I left it in my backyard for months until I had time to process it.
During this period, my interest in brewing with wild yeast was also increasing. I would surf the home-brew web looking for stories, tips, tricks, processes. Along the way I came across a snippet of information about how families of antiquity had magic paddles and pieces of wood called "Kveikstokks" that they would use during their brewing process. Or at least paddles that they thought were magic. As it turns out, probably, there were just cultures of yeast living in those paddles, living off of whatever residual sugars were in the paddle. And when they stirred the wort with the paddle, said yeast was mixed into the wort. Sometime later the wort began bubbling up (fermenting) and there was much rejoicing in the village.
My mind went straight to my log. It was weathered and cracked, clearly aged by the elements... and possibly decayed by yeast and bacteria. I thought, "what if I put my log into a batch of beer?" So I did. And it fermented beautifully!
Now, we don't dip the magic log into our beers to ferment them. And we've since capture additional strains of yeast. In our Table Beer, we're using a strain captured from honeyscukle in Yonkers. We sent a samples of the slurry to Jeff Mello, proprietor and propegator at Bootleg Biology in Nashville Tennessee. Bootleg Biology has help us isolate, sequence and identify a pure cultures so that we can use them in commercial brewing.
To that end, I began foraging firewood in my local park. Fallen dead branches, etc. On one occasion, while foraging firewood, I found a particularly dry, cracked and weathered log (this detail will be significant later), and it was beautiful to boot. Gnarled and twisted, much like a piece of driftwood. I took it home with the intent to burn it, but as I considered it, I thought, "This log is too beautiful to burn. Perhaps I'll make a decorative piece out of it. Lacquer it or something." So, I left it in my backyard for months until I had time to process it.
During this period, my interest in brewing with wild yeast was also increasing. I would surf the home-brew web looking for stories, tips, tricks, processes. Along the way I came across a snippet of information about how families of antiquity had magic paddles and pieces of wood called "Kveikstokks" that they would use during their brewing process. Or at least paddles that they thought were magic. As it turns out, probably, there were just cultures of yeast living in those paddles, living off of whatever residual sugars were in the paddle. And when they stirred the wort with the paddle, said yeast was mixed into the wort. Sometime later the wort began bubbling up (fermenting) and there was much rejoicing in the village.
My mind went straight to my log. It was weathered and cracked, clearly aged by the elements... and possibly decayed by yeast and bacteria. I thought, "what if I put my log into a batch of beer?" So I did. And it fermented beautifully!
Now, we don't dip the magic log into our beers to ferment them. And we've since capture additional strains of yeast. In our Table Beer, we're using a strain captured from honeyscukle in Yonkers. We sent a samples of the slurry to Jeff Mello, proprietor and propegator at Bootleg Biology in Nashville Tennessee. Bootleg Biology has help us isolate, sequence and identify a pure cultures so that we can use them in commercial brewing.
