Long time, no update
Happy holidays everyone! I apologize for the lack of updates over the past few months. The Fall semester here at Indiana University has been a killer, and it turns out that having 1-year-old twins isn't easy either...
Anyway, we've finally got some things to report! After begging and pleading, we managed to get all of the samples from our backers submitted and processed. For the most part, this involved pelleting out cells from submitted beers by centrifugation. The cells were then stored in DNA/RNA Shield, a nifty reagent from Zymo Research that offers long-term stability of samples at room temp. We're sending the samples off to California today for deep sequencing, so we should have our data in early 2020. We'll certainly keep you posted as they send us back information.
On the other side of things, we've also begun the Mixed Culture Madness portion of the experiment. In October, our friends at Upland Brewing Co. filled an oak barrel from Oliver Winery with the same turbid mash wort that they fill their coolship with to make spontaneous fermentation beer. We then inoculated it with the backer-submitted mixed culture samples, and the beer is bubbling away as we speak. We're going to collect a sample every month (Sample 2 is being pulled today) for a year and then sequence everything at the end to determine how the super-mixed culture evolved over time. If anyone ever makes the pilgrimage to Upland's sour facility, the Woodshop, you should take a tour and ask about the barrel. Who knows, they may even pour you a sample :-)
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