Hi all, thanks for the input - sorry I haven't been back for a few days, work's been crazy this past week.
To answer some of the questions asked -
No, it wasn't krausen, I know what krausen looks like and it wasn't it, like I said before it was a 1/2" thick gelatinous mass... consequently since my first posting the mass has been broken up by a small krausen bubbling up from underneath leaving new colonies of developing yeast and bacteria that I could only describe as looking like very small granules of cottage cheese. Also, the funky creamed corn smell has dissipated and has been replaced with the tart slightly citrus smell of the yeast's normal fermentation.
Are you saying it isn't yeast at all or does the OP live downwind from a brewery?
Nope, no brewery within 50 miles at least of where I live - just farms, old orchards, an odd homebrewer or two like myself, and woodlands full of fruit bearing plants. There are a couple vineyards dotted here and there, but because of the topography of where I live they're either two or three mountain ridges/valleys over or several miles downwind of me. No real vector for direct inoculation from these places, I'm more likely to get something from the wild concord and fox grapes that grow right behind my house.
They only way to know what is in that culture is to plate it for singles. If there is top-cropping yeast in the culture, then the OP's collection devices were contaminated with microflora from his brewery because the The probability of finding a top cropping strain in the wild while not zero is very very low.
This yeast is not a top cropper at all - when I collected it, it went straight to the bottom to ferment. Although there is a possibility and a vector for contamination, I used equipment which had never held any of my previous brews. Although not certain, I'm guessing there probably wasn't any cross contamination with the yeasts I buy b/c all I ever use are ale yeasts which are top croppers (as do most of the homebrewers around here do as well). Also, the wild sample I took didn't floc very well (all the yeast I buy are good at flocculation), but after a year of sitting in the basement [just like a gueuze] it looked crystal clear beautiful with a fine silty cake on the bottom.
In the meantime I've also taken a sample from the bark of a white oak (it was foaming and bubbling just like the maple I found two years earlier) and I've started an elderflower mead using just the yeast off the flowers themselves. Hell, I've also seen pine trees with damaged bark foaming around here, and they're not one of the trees traditionally considered to host fermentation yeasts. All these samples have been taken within a 5 mile radius of each other and have (so far) shown to be fairly good at fermentation once they get going (I'll know their alc. tolerance once the mead finishes, there's enough sugar to reach 14% if it runs completely dry, but I doubt it will reach that) I just seem to be blessed with a local environment that harbors wild yeast strains a-plenty.
In the future I will adjust my starters to have a lower pH, I was looking back through my notes and realized I had added some citric acid (lemon juice/pulp) to my original collection starter 2 years ago since I first intended to use the yeast for mead, not beer. That's probably what kept the other micro-flora in check the last time around, or it could have been airborne contamination when I was transferring liquids from one flask to the next - we'll probably never know...
Topic: Wild Yeast Revisited (Read 4861 times)
