Thursday, June 25, 2009

Brewing with Synthetic Yeast

Those best-laid plans, eh? To occupy you loyal readers while in San Francisco, my plan was to have the queue stocked with a bunch of odds 'n' ends that spill out from my notebook and never make it (yet) into an official piece of writing. Instead, they're in the land of misfit postings. I didn't get the finishing touches on any of them before I left, so here's a quick one that I'll throw out to you commercial and home brewers: Would you brew with synthetic yeast (presuming you haven't already)? Or is this topic of synthetic yeast messing a bit too much with the Life of a Beer? The link below will take you to the NPR podcast (not too long at just under 20 minutes) from a few months back where the discussion was held about the possibilities of brewing with synthetic yeast. 'Til we meet again...Weigh in... Better Brewing through Synthetic Biology?

1 comment:

Adam said...

Didn't click through, but, as a homebrewer I think it would diminish the value of the brewing process. I like the idea of natural yeast brewing beer naturally.

Of course, this is coming from an extract brewer. If I were really so in love with the natural ways of things, I would probably be using the all grain method.

Come to think of it, we've been messing with yeast for years to preserve certain strains and isolate others. Its not like we're all making traditional lambics with wild yeast in open fermenters in our back yards.

I'll have to click through to the podcast for more I guess.