Long time, no note...

Hey everyone, sorry for the long periods of silence between updates.  Jeff and I have been busy working behind the scenes to get everything squared away for the project.  We had some trouble finding the proper grain (especially from diverse geographic locations) to start with, but Jeff has tracked down what we need.  He also sent me some pilot-scale reagents, and we were able to recreate his souring process in the lab here at IU.  We harvested microbes and DNA from grain samples and a souring time course, and the great folks at Zymo Research are going to sequence the microbial DNA soon.  If that goes smoothly, Jeff is going to make the trip to IU in November for the full-scale project.  I have a feeling we'll end up sampling a few local sour beers while we're at it...

Jeff and I have also both seen some weird haze left in the sour beer post souring and during fermentation:

 

As you can see in the above picture, the beer is super-hazy aside from a small zone of clearing near the liquid-air interface.  Oddly enough, the extent of this clear zone depends on the yeast strain doing the fermenting.  Bottles 156 and 193 show similar, minimal clearing and were fermented with Schizosaccharomyce japonicus and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, respectively.  Bottle 169 was fermented with Brettanomyces bruxellensis, and it shows the most clearing.  This image is from a few weeks ago, but the trend is similar today.  The Brett beer is largely clear the whole way through (or at least translucent), but the others remain very hazy.  I'm going to bottle these soon, but I'll collect samples of the haze and sediment to observe via microscopy.  Stay tuned...

Matt