Monitoring Yeast Health: The Benefits for Brewers

Every brewer knows it: consistency is key. You do not want your customer feeling like they show up for the same delicious brew every time and then letting them down by having your flavor and aroma profile being off.

You try to control this variance by using the exact same sourced ingredients, from the same supplier, in the same quantities.

And still, you find something off in each batch.

What is it?

Many brewers don’t realize the precise power of yeast. It is yeast, overwhelmingly, that will have the largest effect on your flavor and aroma profile – the thing that will bring those customers back over and over, or turn them away for good.

Yeast

Yeast has a long and marvelous history with fermentation.

A single celled, eukaryotic living organism, yeast can reproduce on its own, asexually, and without oxygen (anaerobically), or it can reproduce sexually with the help of oxygen (aerobically).

It has managed to survive and thrive for millions of years.

One of the first life forms on earth as a member of the fungus family, yeast has one job, and it is very good at it: to consume sugar and convert it to alcohol and carbon dioxide.

It has been performing its oh-so-essentially function for millennia, attracted to ripening fruit fallen off the vine or tree, and making a wine mush that no one really noticed.

Until monkeys did.

That’s right. Monkey figured out what yeast was doing, likely long before humans even began making wine, and would wait for fruit to ripen and fall off the tree, then for the yeast to ferment that fruit, and they would eat it and get slightly drunk.

Or very drunk depending on how much fruit they consumed.

Then, of course, humans discovered they could essentially do the same thing with wine – crush grapes and leave the juice out to ferment.

Yeast is everywhere. It is in the air, on surfaces, on your skin, and in your body.

Just waiting for an opportunity to get to fermenting.

Finally, through a happy accident, we discovered, or rather, invented, beer.

Yeast in Brewing

The story goes that a woman was likely out harvesting her grain when a storm must have struck. She quickly took shelter, leaving her basket of grain behind.

When she returned, days later, she found soggy grain covered in rain water.

Never one to waste food or fresh water, she turned the soggy grain into a bread dough that would rise unlike anything she had seen before. Now she had the recipe for a light and fluffy bread!

And the rain water/grain water, would have provided her family with a light euphoric effect.

There could not have been much alcohol in early beer as yeast wants sugar, not starch. So yeast would have had to work very hard to convert those starches, which are sugar adjacent, into alcohol. But that little alcohol did provide a decontamination effect for the family’s water supply.

So beer became hugely and quickly popular as a safe drink for families to give their children and serve with meals. Ale was also much more nutritious than just water, thick and rich with grain as it was.

The Role of Yeast in Consistency

It would be hundreds of years before brewers picked up this beverages as something to serve road weary travelers, and then many years longer before they realized that roasting the barley or other grain first would convert the starches in the grain to sugars, increasing the alcohol content.

And finally, brewers would come to be known for their excellent brew.

How?

Remember: consistency is key.

Brewers would take great pains to propagate their own yeast, pitch the slurry from existing batches into the next batch, all in the name of repeating the magic their customers sought.

Fortunately, we have amazing technology today that makes consistency simple and easy – yeast activity monitoring.

Monitoring Yeast Health: What It Is and the Benefits

Today, thanks to the handheld, user friendly devices you can work with the touch of a screen, you can watch your yeast closely to ensure that every single pitch you make aligns with the high expectations your consumers have come to have.

It is not new to brewing, the concept that you can check cell count or even viability of your yeast, but it has always been a long, drawn out process that required difficult to handle microscopes and test tubes, mathematical calculations and a fairly extensive knowledge of chemistry and biology, at least insofar as yeast was concerned.

No more.

Now, as long as you know the basics, you can figure out how your yeast is performing and how the next batch will perform, and then what steps to take to rectify any problems.

With an adaptable compact yeast monitor, you can not only check the cell count of a batch of yeast before you pitch it, but you can also monitor how your yeast is performing as it ferments your brew.

You can check to see if fermentation is slowing down, if it is going too fast, or if it is underperforming in any other way outside of your expectations.

But why would you go through all of this? Microscopes and test tubes or handheld devices, to monitor your yeast activity?

To monitor your yeast health!

And why would you want to do that?

Remember? Consistency is key.

The benefits of monitoring yeast health include being able to predict exactly when a batch of yeast will be slowing down, so you can propagate a fresh batch or reach out to your supplier to order a fresh batch. Or both.

You could also compare variations in different batches of brew, whether you are using the same strain or different ones, to see if you then have a preference based on performance or if you need to make tweaks in other factors.

Monitoring the activity of your yeast will allow you to accurately gauge a normal fermentation curve for a particular strain of yeast and for a specific brew. All of which will then help streamline your process.

Finally, regular and consistent, and accurate, yeast monitoring will give you the opportunity to better experiment with your yeast, helping you to become an expert in your brew, and gain experience your customers will be enormously grateful for.

There really is no downside to accurate yeast monitoring, and only many, many upsides to be found.

Cheers!

Passionate about the beer and/or wine making process? So are we! If you’re interested in finding out how you can use our technology to control fermentation and monitor your yeast, save work hours and improve the cost-efficiency of your business, drop us a line at [email protected] or check out our product pages (automated yeast activity monitoring for beer & wine):

Also, you can now get access to a fully functional demo account to test our Web App. Completely free of charge and with no commitment to purchase.

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