PAUL HOBSON & LARA MURPHY
“We love the character Brettanomyces lambicus gives when used for primary fermentation. It suggests hay and leather when you smell it but gives off a great pear/pineapple flavor with just a little bit of that drying, phenolic, funky snap. Then you put Citra or Mosaic in it, and, well . . .”
| SIZE | 5.5 gallons (20.8 L) |
| ORIGINAL GRAVITY | 1.060 |
| FINAL GRAVITY | 1.008 |
| IBU | 45 |
| SRM | 4 |
| ABV | 6.8% |
MALTS AND ADJUNCTS
9.1 pounds (4.1 kg) Pale Malt
2.8 pounds (1.3 kg) White Wheat Malt
0.5 pound (226 g) Acidulated Malt
0.5 pound (226 g) Briess Carapils
HOPS (60-MINUTE BOIL)
1.15 ounces (32 g) Chinook (13% AA), 60 minutes
3.5 ounces (99 g) Citra (12% AA), Flameout (steep 30 minutes)
3.5 ounces (99 g) Cascade (5.5% AA), Flameout (steep 30 minutes)
3.0 ounces (85 g) Citra, Dry hop 3 days
2.0 ounces (56 g) Cascade, Dry hop 3 days
3.0 ounces (85 g) Mosaic (12.5% AA), Dry hop 3 days
YEAST
40.5 ounces (1,200 ml) Starter White Labs WLP653 Brettanomyces lambicus
NOTES
Water Profile (in parts per million) Adjust water to Ca: 90, Mg: 15, Na: 64, SO4: 178, Cl: 102, HCO3: 104
Mash Mash temperature, 151°F (66°C), 60 minutes
Mash out temperature, 168°F (75°C), 15 minutes
Brewing At the end of the boil, cycle the hot wort through a plate chiller and back into the kettle until the base temperature in the kettle falls below 170°F (76°C). Then start the 30-minute whirlpool rest.
Fermenting Ferment at 72°F (22°C) for 12 to 14 days.
BOOTLEG BIOLOGY BUGS OUT
Jeff Mello was fed up. Working as a fundraiser for Washington, D.C., nonprofits was fulfilling, but work was a slog. “He was coming home and dreading going to work the next day,” his wife, Erin, recalls. He had started homebrewing, though. “The more I brewed, the more I realized that it was my passion,” he recalls. “So I quit.”
After reading an article about lambic starters, Mello filled three mason jars with wort, crowned them with cheesecloth, and placed the yeast feast in his garden. Then he put the jars in a closet. “When I looked at them a few months later, they were completely nasty,” he says. The first jar smelled like creamed corn. The second had grown something mushroomy. The third one smelled like . . . honey? “It had promise,” says Mello, who brewed with the yeast, which resulted in a cross between a saison and a spicy hefeweizen, something familiar yet thrillingly new. He named the strain S. arlingtonensis, after his backyard in Arlington, Virginia, and pondered the microverse surrounding him. “If I could get yeast that made pretty good beer from my backyard, where else could I get them?”
In 2013, that curiosity became Bootleg Biology, an open-source endeavor to obtain and isolate microbes from free-range sources such as flowers, kimchi, walnuts, yogurt, bottle dregs, and even spruce berries from a Colorado amusement park. “You can buy pure brewer’s yeast cultures, but I wanted to show people that you can source yeast from anywhere,” says Mello, who now lives in Nashville. “Yeast provides a sense of place.”
To underscore that idea, he launched the Local Yeast Project to amass the world’s most diverse bank of microbes, one from every American ZIP code. Since the Postal Service has approximately 43,000 codes—“I looked up the number once and decided that I’d never think about it again”—Mello needed help. “I thought, If I’m going to make this project successful, then I really need to focus on teaching people to harvest yeast.”
To his surprise, culturing yeast proved pretty simple. “You can buy agar at international food stores, and Petri dishes are just plastic plates,” he explains. To empower other brewers, he designed the Backyard Yeast Wrangling Tool Kit, which contains all the tubes, pipettes, and sterile swabs necessary to capture wild yeast. When someone isolates a strain, he or she plops a cultured swab into a prepaid envelope and mails it to Mello, who deposits it in his bank.
“The kit was a great idea, but it’s not the end goal. The goal was to create a yeast company.” Over the last couple of years, Bootleg Biology has started selling homebrew and commercial strains, including Sour Weapon, isolated from Nashville-area flowers; the Funk Weapon series of Brettanomyces cultures; and a saison blend curated by homebrew legend Michael Tonsmeire, better known as the Mad Fermentationist. Bootleg Biology also does quality control for local breweries, testing beers’ bitterness, checking for contamination, and banking yeast and bacteria in their laboratory-grade freezer. “We want to do all the things that we think are exciting at the same time,” Mello says. “I never want to be just a yeast factory.”
East Coast Yeast
New Jersey microbiologist Al Buck focuses on reviving forgotten yeast strains and a wide range of wild blends.
TRY ECY10 Old Newark Ale, reportedly the house strain for Ballantine Ale, which was produced in Newark.
Escarpment Laboratories
Two Ontario college students turned their yeast-harvesting hobby into a business supplying Canadian brewers and homebrewers with strains, such as the fruity Foggy London Ale.
TRY Ontario Farmhouse Ale Blend, which contains yeast isolated from native strawberries and Brettanomyces strains sourced from Ontario wine barrels.
Imperial Yeast
This Portland, Oregon, company produces more than 25 strains of USDA-certified organic yeast, uniquely packaged in cans.
TRY W15 Suburban Brett. Dark fruit is this strain’s dominant attribute, ideal for wood-aged beers.
Inland Island Yeast Laboratories
Denver friends John Giarratano and Matthew Peetz grew industrial-scale yeast for the biofuel industry before launching this start-up that sells scores of strains from sake to Oregon IPA.
TRY INIS-903 Brettanomyces Bruxellensis III, isolated from a Belgian brewery, delivers huge gusts of tropical fruit.
Omega Yeast Labs
Founder Lance Shaner uses his 16 years of homebrewing experience, plus a PhD in molecular genetics and microbiology, at his Chicago-based lab that sells yeast suited for fruity IPAs and funky wild beers alike.
TRY Saisonstein’s Monster, their homegrown hybrid of French and Belgian saison strains that creates a strong, spicy farmhouse ale with tartness and a touch of bubble gum.
The Yeast Bay
Bio-scientist Nick Impellitteri founded this Bay Area lab that has supplied brewers with award-winning strains, including Funktown Pale Ale and Wallonian Farmhouse.
TRY Amalgamation, a blend of six Brettanomyces strains, produces a bright, kindling-dry beer with a multifaceted fruit flavor.
