More Yeast and American Styles Tasting

Today was a rough day. After a long day of biology yesterday, today we talked more about biochemistry of yeast. The lecture was long and dry, mostly talking about NAD and ATP and how sugars are metabolized and turned into alcohol. I spent a large portion of the day tracing cycles to try and make sense of what was going on. Luckily, I was not the only one having trouble. After the morning though, things did get much more interesting after lunch.

After lunch, we talked more about the practical side of yeast and yeast propagation. We discussed how to isolate yeast cells and how to grow pure yeast cultures. I have always had an idea to brew a beer using all Alabama ingredients, and after our lecture today, I feel like I have enough knowledge of the propagation procedure to grow some yeast cultures and see if I can cultivate any yeast that is living in the wild from Alabama to make this beer. I am really looking forward to actually doing some of this lab work when we get to the applied brewing techniques portion of the module.

After we were done with our main lecture for the day, we had a palate training session using American beer styles. I think my favorite beer of the day was the Lagunitas Pale Ale. It was extremely hoppy for a pale ale, and there was no mistaking that the beer was very unbalanced, but it was such a great hop flavor, the balance didn't bother me one bit. I think I'll need to seek out a few 6 packs of that beer since I don't think I've seen it back home.