This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. Oh, and these posts are organized into a series now. You can see the post series page here. The past week has been a bit nuts, with the start of the semester, which explains the delay!
This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. Oh, and these posts are organized into a series now. You can see the post series page here. The past week has been a bit nuts, with the start of the semester, which explains the delay!
One of the podcasts I listen to quite a bit is Stuff You Missed in History Class. They recently ran a “classic” episode demystifying the life of Johnny Appleseed, as John Chapman has become known. Now, all I really knew about him was from the Disney cartoon and one volume about the man in the Value Tales books. (Remember those? The one about him was titled The Value of Love.) Given that, I found it surprisingly interesting, though it turns out it’s pretty hard to demystify the life of someone about whom a lot of stuff has been made up… and who …
Some beer news, since I haven’t posted anything in ages. It’s now been four years since I’ve made any beer myself, though I am hoping to get a Saison brewed before the end of summer. (It’s hot enough for it, after all!) But this is a news news post, since there’s been some odd and interesting brewing-related pieces in the news.
So, back in 2011 I mentioned the discovery of S. eubayanus in the wild in Patagonia. That’s exciting because S. pastorianus (often called “lager yeast” in English: it’s the yeast used to make a lot what the world recognizes as “beer” today, for better or worse) is actually a hybrid of two other kinds of yeast: that is, it was formed when two different kinds of yeast contributed DNA to a hybrid yeast. Those two yeasts were S. cerevisae (familiar as top-fermenting brewer’s yeast, but in fermenting other alcohols and making bread as well), and an until-recently mysterious, never-before isolated strain that got called S. eubayanus. The latter yeast was …