Transcript

Designing Novel Beers with Foraged Yeast | Jasper Akerboom | TEDxAshburnSalon

[Music] fear fear is science beard is community there is engineering there is the glue that binds us together the beer is the camaraderie beard is what what what lifted us what we're in trouble as humankind we couldn't drink water we could drink beer so beer it is a lot of things and in this store I really want to go over those things and really make those things clear and we'll talk to you about the role of G's play since process and beer banking so if you can hear from the Netherlands is a beautiful country beautiful windmills lots of tulips over there it's a very small country sandwiched in between the diversity Germany in Belgium people think about people who choose on bikes and of course lots of cheese and those things are all true I did my education over there before I came to the United States oh I did that engaged education there before I came to the United States and I studied microbiology over there and the reason why I went into microbiology is because I was very interested in the world we couldn't really see around us but that's there and that really intrigued me so when I but I studied over there is microorganisms living under very extreme positions you can imagine for example organisms that live in hot vents or organisms that live in salt lakes so I studied that for a while how the news or mrs. duner right they survived and I did it for a long time and I made a switch Mackenzie United States about ten years ago I joined a hard Jukes Medical Institute to Lamb of law and uber and I switched fields I went into neuroscience at least I designed protein since we used in neuroscience to image brain activity some totally different and it was great career you know thing went well and I was all my waiting to become I guess like and path would be a professor or something like that and then but I decided to go into beer beer science so as you can imagine it was kind of a hard phone call to make with my mom she was like what are you doing the hats but it's it's it's a brewing and beer making there's so much to it so when you think about the brewing process there's engineering involves there's biology and both think about the ingredients should we use so there's multiple e so far T as a plant obviously that's grown specifically for beer hops another plant that's used in the process water waters extremely important water chemistry final chemistry there's enzymes that are active during the mashing process in the brewing process that will confer to starches inner presence into sugars that are later on the microbiology are being used by the east that will turn and then into alcohol and co2 so it's a lot of different fields right there so you can really if you think about brewing there's so much to it so that's why I was really interested in going into the field and like I said East right now what is East Jesus doesn't is the in my opinion the most important part in the room process the brewer just makes these sugary stinking liquids the yeast will actually take that and I converted into alcohol co2 aroma and flavor what we like so much so he is a single-celled organism if you look at the Tree of Life there's basically three glass there's the bacteria there's the archaea and there's eukaryotes when you think about the bacteria can think about the bacteria that make yogurt you can think about the pathogens that make you sick or maybe nitrogen fixation bacteria that are very useful and corchia is a cloud of those ancient organisms i talked about that i studied in the past that are living for very extreme conditions and there's the eukaryotes now you can think of eukaryotic simple organisms like fungus mushrooms but also more complex organisms like plants humans are also eukaryotes and actually yeast is also in eukaryotes so we think about it these and humans are actually quite similar some of these than humans are much more similar than for example humans and bacteria or yeast and bacteria well what is the one thing illness like humans like sugar I have to go to the dentist again because I put so much sugar in my coffee that it's like a returning thing for me and he's like sugar as well so one thing is does it will take that sugar and convert it into alcohol and co2 and those play as I was talking about the reason it does that is because it will create energy for itself to co2 and alcohol and the rest has come to buy products but that's good for us so that's why the yeast that is being used in the brewing process is called Sakura my C's so Sakura Sakura my C's sugar is basically subtitle it makes total sense and it's not just for beer brewing fantasies so important it's her basically every other alcohol beverage beverage production so think about wine and if you make wine he needs east it was wine we'll turn those sugars that were present in the grapes into alcohol and co2 co2 obviously will evaporate out of the barrels but champagne still has it like I said Ward's of his sugar sticky liquids you know he's will turn it into alcohol co2 but also when you make for example corn whiskey you have to make a mash and yeast will turn those starches sugars into present in that mash into an alcohol co2 aromas and flavors before it's distilled so it's extremely important so every process that produces alcohol yeast plays a very important role and there's of course all kinds of different strains of yeast so you know you can make a selection right there now if we go back to the brewing process and we think about a little bit more what does it actually do right so it's a very good regimented process so several steps that you take and you don't end up at certain points so you start it's the mash you know then you've filtered it off then you do the boil and it's like that's for basically every brewery in the world you know there's made these small changes but that's what it is so it's a very regimented process that the brewer goes through because he's interested in getting same products all the time that's very important right that's what the consumer likes now the yeast is essential in it's like a simple form so it will take whatever the sugary liquids the brewer makes and turn them into a beer now if you think about it you know so it's basically like this straightforward process there's another depiction over here where you can see the different ingredients is basically like a straight line now you start over here you go through the motions he used like a store-bought piece that most of the breweries do they end up over there it's basically almost the same and we as humans are very good at engineering and controlling things so nowadays these breweries of marvels of industry of engineering is like come true cultural panels everywhere it's all computer operated at least most of them so that we control exactly what's going on which is of course what we want but it's also kind of takes away from the things we can do so what if we instead of going like a straight road right by starting like with the ingredients we have and then just going straight to the endpoints what if we would take it none of those like take a sign throat like take a bath with our struggles so to speak and instead of using the eases that you can normally buy that they'll give the beard that is normally produced if you would go outside and try to isolate these from the other side for yeast is just present and see if we can end up with different beers and kind of break that pattern so that's what we did is so we went outside and we started to isolate strains sealant with turnouts into a beer energy very light so here you can see some pictures so for example we went to upstate New York to the Finger Lakes region beautiful area producing that are kind of one few words there's a lot of wine growing there beautiful area so there Peter s obviously there's like yeast over there so we found some my strengths and we were able to use those and attorney tool appeared it was very different than what you normally would make so bees play the key role in that but not just them not just those kind of occasions like a cystic only presence you could say it like microbial life is everywhere so we are also able to isolate strains from the street behind my house which is just a suburban area it doesn't look very appealing it's basically they're just nature roads but the strange that we were able to get from that place were really good they gave a period is very unexpected for you mellow very nice we were able to isolate strange moment from old barrels that were excavated in Washington DC that were used a long time ago by default brewery now and we were able to get used from that by scraping those barrels are growing that up so the East they're really turned deaf ear into something totally different and actually when you compare them ales from the function from now it's like totally different than you would that those the beautiful will be incomparable it was much more fruity and was much more character for something as we've never ever would have imagined and then last up at least we collaborated with Bailey Old West trying to get these from fossils they would find out of these dismal swamps so you can see picture that over there so penny'll quest we were able to get yeast on these bones so they would find fossils bring them off from these swamps and I was very against it I was like there's no way that's gonna be sunspots but I was wrong you know we went to the museum we swap those bones we did some testing there were some strengthen were not very good but there were some really nice and we brewed a beer with that bomb toasters and it was very nice it was a very interesting strain it was again something different something we never expects so by doing by giving it basically the reins to the East's we fell down to places that we would never have imagined it could have gone to so it's basically what I want to take home message from you is it's it's a perfect partnership we basically provide the youth with what it needs and we'll make sure it has the sugar it needs by brewing by doing the brewing process and then the yeast we'll take it from there and we'll produce something out of it so by going outside of the normal of the normal lines trying to go somewhere else we were able to expand the balance and the next time but you are trying to be a you might have never had just think about that what the yeast will do in a beer did there's no justice the brewer that has like a certain saving over the recipe but that the yeast is instrumental in giving it flavor and aroma to the beer as well and that's kind of what I wanted to tell the story so thank you very much [Applause] you