The start of spontaneous fermentation can be an interesting phenomenon. Before the Revenge of Beer and Louis Pasteur’s finding of the wondrous life of yeast, people actually did believe it was magical. What made it more interesting is just how much of our life depends on fermentation in today’s culture.
There are a few main categories to fermented goods that are pervasive throughout today’s culture including:
Fermented Beverages—these include beer, wine, and spirits among other beverages.
Bread
Cheese
Sausage
The main goal of this blog is to learn each of these four Tiers of Zymology. Hopefully, this will become a resource for people interested in these hobbies to learn from and try new experiments.
Currently I engage in brewing beer and have recently started bread making. I started brewing beer a little over four years ago and have enjoyed every second of learning while doing it. Lately I’ve decided to start making my first few sour beers by using commercial bacteria. Hopefully in a few months I can try my hand at spontaneous fermentation and then slanting that bacteria to create my own cultures.
A few weeks ago I also began to make sourdough bread. Unfortunately I think my sourdough starter has died from lack of maintenance. I’ll get more into the sourdough bread making in a future post as well as the state of my beer brewing. My hope is to have a monthly summary of fermentation along with normal blog posts.
The other two “tiers” I have done a lot of reading on them but have not began. As I have found with sourdough bread, things in one tier can be adopted in another tier. One such thing is maintaining bacteria for beer. The bacteria found in sourdough, lactobacillus, is also commonly used in many lambic beers found in belgium.
For a little background there are three bacterias besides yeast commonly used in brewing beer.
Brettanomyces
Pediococcus
Lactobacillus
To maintain them you can go about it with a feeding schedule similiar to that of your sourdough bread culture. This means you can save a lot of money. Next up I’ll get more into my first attempt at sourdough bread.