Happy Birthday to Me! and News

Happy New Year to all of you first. To a new year with lots of good beer and increasing the biodiversity of yeast strains! Now back to the topic. Eureka, I got a notification today:

Happy Anniversary!

You registered on WordPress.com 2 years ago!

Well Happy Birthday to Me then. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the 78,723 readers/viewers over the last two years. The blog gets more and more views every month and cracked the 6,000 views per month in October 2013. Well, I started this blog in January 2012 to get in contact with other yeast and bacteria hunters in the world. On one hand to share some of my results and on the other hand to get yeast ranching discussions going. And only yeast ranching. However mainly on a scientific level since I initially believed that most of the yeast ranchers out there have a scientific background. Another main goal was to publish our recipes to share the experiences we made with others.

And here am I now. Two years later to reconsider some of the points mentioned earlier. I realized after the first year of blogging that there are a lot of people out there with a non-scientific background interested in yeast ranching as well as general yeast techniques such as harvesting, storing and so on. I posted some general yeast posts in 2012 which apparently remain the most visited posts on my blog even in 2013. Judging from these results, there seems to be a demand for general information to eventually get people into yeast ranching. I will therefore focus more on yeast posts in the future instead of posting homebrew recipes and tastings. But I keep the option open. Unfortunately the blog’s name has no association with yeast. But I don’t care about that.

What can you expect to read on this blog in the future ?

• Posts concerning other yeasts which are associated with beer and other fermented beverages. No spoilers here
• Covering the Brettanoymces specific chemistry and enzymes involved to create the love or hate character of Brett beers
• A series of posts about Brettanomyces in collaboration with Dmitri (bkyeast)
• Insight into the Brettanoymces draft genome/s (will take me another while though)
• Further posts about isolating yeasts from beer. But only very special cases
• Preliminary data about other selective media I tested to differentiate between Brettanoymces species (repeat: differentiate between species)
• Results form the BBA/EBY Brettanoymces experiment
• Any interesting yeast related topics I come across

Any other news?

• Eureka Brewing Yeast releases? Not before first results are in from the experiment. And I cannot tell how long this will take as it depends on the collaborators to hand in results. And me to go through the results to make my decisions…
• New strains of Brettanomyces from various new sources will be included into the Eureka Brewing Yeast program. Possible candidates for another Brettanomyces experiment? Who knows
• Eureka Brewing gets a separate German page since information about yeast are not really well documented in German. Ich arbeite seit einiger Zeit an einer Seite um Informationen, die bisher nur in Englisch auf diesem Blog publiziert wurden, auf Deutsch zu übersetzen. Grundlage hier ist ein Hefekurs den ich für einen Homebrewclub gehalten habe. Da meine Grammatik mehr Zufall ist möchten sich doch jene die sich für Korrekturen zur Verfügung stellen würden bei mir per mail melden
• Blackwell Brewery. Still going and planning various collaborations. We are looking for a space to brew in Bern or the neighbourhood of Bern, Switzerland. Anyone with ideas for a possible location for the brewery, per mail melden
  Although read the About page first so you know what you are dealing with…
• Any preternatural (never used that word before, if I used the word in the wrong context, per mail melden.) beers going on? Of course! Various sours are in the pipeline as well as some really strong, really light, really good, really bad and everything in-between beers
• If you are from a small artisanal brewery in Switzerland (or anywhere else) and you are interested in a collaboration, per mail melden. Although read the About page first so you know what you are dealing with…

Thanks for viewing and reading. If you haven’t learned anything new here let me remind you that you eventually learned that “per mail melden” means “please write us a really nice, well structured e-mail with “hello” and “goodbye” and leaving your name” in German. Cheers!