The hunt for the yeast

Right now the Duchess’ Mountains – overlooking Borgorose and Valle del Salto – are all white, covered with snow. But when we shoot the video and took the pictures you can see here and below the text it was quite hot! But what were Leonardo and David – our Control Quality Lab supervisor – doing, in the middle of last summer, walking around the mountains? Don’t worry, we are not going to show you our holiday videos, but we are going to tell you about one of the latest, and most interesting, project we are working on here at Birra del Borgo: the hunt for the yeast!

Beer lovers and beer experts always talk about hops and malts as if they were the biggest issue (maybe even more that the World Cup soccer team!) but they often forget the real “key ingredient” for craft beer – the real head brewer, as Leo states in the video: yeast.
As we could already verify choosing the right yeast for our Maledetta, differents yeast give birth to completely different beers. So, it had been a while that Leonardo was thinking about it: finding a “local yeast”, typical of this precise area, and hale enough to ferment the worth, helping us to make our beers even more unique and “typical”.
So Leonardo, Andrea and David prepared the “traps” with liquid or gelified media to seize the yeasts carried along by wind and animals. Then they positioned them up on the trees or on the grass in the windiest areas, also thanks to the collaboration of the Duchess’ Mountains Natural Reserve’s Rangers guided by Michele Luce.
24 hours later they went to retrieve the traps; since then, David has been working in his lboratory to find the most interesting and active yeast. Actually savage yeasts need a “settling phase” to merge with malts through several fermentations, so that they can smooth their sharpest aspects and develop the right features to be used in brewing.

“Our” yeast are mainly at their third fermenting generation: we need a little bit of patience, and some more fermenting process, and then we should be able to shortlist the right ones.
We will keep you updated about it… and most of all we will tell you when there will be something to open and drink!

watch the video: The hunt for the yeast

Leo, David and Michele Luce