alzymologist

Refractometers are quite useful for pale wort and clear distillation products - or anything where you calibrate close to target phase subspace (honey, must, well-known beer recipe, etc.). I use mine to determine when fermentation rate slows down to determine termination in yeast tests - their relative readings are OK, if they aren't changing, it's worth considering density is stable.

Regarding U-tube, that's fun enough little project if done right. I had even more daring idea to build contactless (read through glass) density scanner, I even have the already soldered and flashed board and transceivers somewhere around the place. The prospect of quick reading density and inner fluid temperature without exposure seems attractive enough, but it's a lot of research work to tune this tool concept, and then to turn it into comfortable product, and I'm kind of short of time-money invariant resource now.

Refractometers are no good at all, especially with THIS much colored stuff. Could get over 2x error, which is nonsense.

After all, you don't have to lose that stuff, if you had a tall and narrow plastic cylinder, that would fill that glass on the photo when you are done.

I was thinking to design and build a U-tube density meter for regular people who can't realistically spend a few thousands on proper tool, I can see those in slightly above decent refractometer price range (and that would indeed take small amount of sample, not as small as refractometer, but still). I wonder if I'd be able to sell enough to cover the expences (and myself I do have a ridiculously expensive and unnecessarily fancy MettlerToledo U tool in addition to all floaters and refractomters, remaining from good old times I was hoping to do paid analytics for microbreweries and thus needed something certified).

EU authentic produce guidelines

Would you share a link to this?

Did spurce basic pilsener ale experiment this summer! Of course, seeing them for what they are, I've stayed away from all pumps and filters, decanted the boil with tips and threw some tips for "dry... tipping?" Then some needles sneaked into the bottles. I've used fresh tips so they are just crunchy snack when you drink it. Weirdest thing, but I'm pretty sure it tastes like legendary Sahti beer. Well, the recipe is technically quite close, I suppose? Still have a few bottles (appropriately stored in sauna lol), I'm curious how it would age over a year or so. Totally doing it again next year.

We've caught something that looks, tastes, smells and behaves like brettanomyces from last field trip. They are really different and it seems their growth and fermentation profile does depend on conditions even more than usually! Never kept this culture before. Waiting for proper tasting procedure (could be something horrendous really, I'm pretty sure those will need some tuning in standard recepies). Then off to the library and store it goes.

Otherwise, there is full freezer of frozen forest berries waiting for the secondary in mead buckets and an infamous BAG I've bought to try the suffering others speak of here. Well, once I'm not the only healthy person in household, we'll have lots of fun stuff to do, sigh.

Are those hops good? Would you share a bit of rhizome for me to clone?

I can't stop thinking that Finnish hops grown in chill weather might be a hidden treasure, once we figure out how to tune the recipes.

But how bad is the washing?

That would be cool indeed! Would you suggest some particular brews we should chase?

One strategy to catch new strains is to give friends that go traveling a couple of plastic test tubes and ask them to save a drop of beer for us. We've got quite a lot of acetic and lactic bacteria this way, of course, but some yeasts too.

GMO yeast distribution has questionable legality here as far as I understand, but it doesn't mean it's illegal to make and study it. I've been looking for some projects to finally play with CRISPR and lyophilization chamber somebody at our lab was building for no particular purpose (we've bargained a sizeable set of used but surprisingly operational Edwards vacuum pumps at ebay, they itch to build something out of them).

Seriously, after seeing feedback here, I'm thinking about selling dry yeast as well, since it's not too much of an upgrade and we can build a stock just for the sake of spreading strains around the globe...

I completely agree that keeping yeast supply lines as local as possible is a good idea, both in terms of distance, and in terms of time. That's the concept here - if we can't get fresh local yeast, then we should make them.

Getting yeast from breweries is good idea, but first, those should ideally come from in-brewery lab, not from propagation (unless it's some kind of local native yeast, I suppose) - fresh lab-propagated yeast always behave much better according to my experience and to literature, also lines tend to mutate or degenerate otherwise without proper single-cell cleaning step occasionally.

Second, as far as I understand, most breweries keep very small selection of yeast. One of the reasons we've got into cultivation of pure varietal yeast is a realization of yeast's impact on final product profile. This was quite a story.

At that point we were much younger and we've doubted that yeast could make lots of impact on fermentation profile, much less dominate it, as literature occasionally claims. Once we've decided to compare several different strains of yeast in mead; we've taken the most straightforward starting material - honey from Texas where we lived back then, that's got all possible flowers blooming almost year round mixed together so that no single flavor could be distinguished - turned it into a must, then divided it into 8 batches and pitched them with different wine yeasts. Expecting subtle difference, we were surprised to find that some turned out like mead, but others were slightly honey-flavored Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sovignon, Riesling, etc. That was the day we've started thinking about building yeast library. Now we keep tasting (I mean, perform organoleptic analysis, it's science!) plain pilsner 1040OG wort with no additions but yeast - and every new strain brings something new, while old strains become as familiar as friends. It's a whole world.

They are certainly good for 20L, that's the amount we use for typical homebrews ourselves.