I am still on planet earth

Dear all, it has been a while since my last post. As life sometimes has some different tasks and projects lined up for you, sometimes you simply cannot cope with everything in parallel. I would like to take the opportunity to talk about some news and the future of this blog.

As you may know, I share the dream of so many homebrewers to eventually make a living with brewing. And step by step, my brother and I created the brand Blackwell Brewery back in early 2012. And since late 2015, Blackwell is actually a legal company and we just need to wait now to get the approval for a liquor licence to make Blackwell an official Swiss brewery. In early 2014, we started brewing as gipsy brewers before investing in our first 400 L brewing kit. This step allowed us to refine our base recipes, playing around with some no-boils & mature beers in barrels for the first time. Without losing to much money (we had to dump a couple of batches though). Not to forget all the collaboration projects we got involved in that gave us more and more insight into the entire beer production work flow. And all our customers and good friends giving us the support and motivation to go the next steps. In less than a month from now, we will move to a new space where we have a good base for whatever might come next.

At Blackwell, we hand-craft all our products on a small quantity with focus on high quality – in effort to give our fans a different tasting product. We plan to brew a variety of styles with focus on Wild, Rustic, Sour, Dark, Light, Über-strong, Fermentation-driven beers. And everything else that floats our boat.

Carnivale Brettanomyces – 2016

I am very privileged and happy to announce that Blackwell got invited to the Carnivale Brettanomyces 2016 festival hosted in Amsterdam (NL) from the 23rd to 26th of June. Not only will there be beer on tap from Blackwell but I will lecture a yeast Master Class at the festival too. For more information about the festival and the lecture, please check-out the following links. Would be great to meet some of my readers in Amsterdam.

https://www.facebook.com/Brettfest/?fref=ts
http://www.wildegist.nl/

Discontinuation of the blog

Since I am still working my day-job and guiding Blackwell alongside, I came to the decision to discontinue publishing material on this blog. As I am a big believer in quality information, I simply don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. However, as I am still doing my yeast projects, I will continue on publishing via the website of the brewery. I will put the new links on this blog as soon as I set-up the website’s blog part. The content of the blog will however stay where it is, I am still available for questions, yeast sharing etc but no new content will be uploaded.

Yeast Lab

What about the release of the EYL yeast strains? This is still a work-in progress project. At the moment, I have a Saccharomyces strain being tested by local brewers. Main reason for that is to check the packaging, propagation and shipping of the product on my side prior to selling the yeast products. The focus will be the supply of yeast products to homebrewers in Switzerland. Shipping outside of Switzerland might come in the future as well. Depending on the local demand. And the release & sell of the yeast will be supported by Blackwell. Meaning, all EYL strains are now owned and managed by Blackwell.

I think that’s enough information for today. The next post will very likely be the last one. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all my fellow blog readers and people who reached out to me by email or placing a comment. I am especially grateful to all the people who pointed out mistakes in the post. Or all the interactions that lead to great friendships. When I started the blog in January 2012, I would have never guessed that so many people would be interested in reading what I am writing. Especially as I am not an English native speaker (nor a very skilled writer). Thank you all.

Kind regards,

Samuel

It’s time to vote for your favourite Eureka Yeast Lab Brett strain

Eureka, its time to announce some changes. First, I would like to announce that Eureka Brewing Yeast (EBY) strains will be replaced by Eureka Yeast Lab (EYL) strains as lots of people mixed up my strains with the ones offered by East Coast Yeast (ECY). I would like to apologize to Al Buck for the unwise abbreviation choice for my yeast strains. I furthermore hope that EYL is easier to distinguish from ECY products. The product numbers will stay the same but EBY will be changed to EYL.

Second, its been a while since Jeff and myself started the EBY/BBA Brettanomyces experiment and its now time to put some action into this story. Although the amount of data I got back from the experiment isn’t as great as expected, its time to prepare the release of two Brett strains. And now is the time to vote for your favourite strain. Or the one looking most promising to you. Only the two strains with the most votes will get released in a couple of weeks. So hurry up and spread the word. The poll will be closed on Monday, 25th of August.

The release will be first announced to the Google Group members at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/eureka-brewing-yeast and later on posted on my blog. Giving the members an advantage. If no vials remain after the Google Group shout-out, no release on my blow will follow. To join the group without a gmail account, simply write an email to eureka-brewing-yeast+subscribe@googlegroups.com to get subscribed. That’s it for today. To Brett biodiversity!

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!