Beard beer
Chapter 4 of The Knowledge talks about the importance of fermentation for making wine, beer, mead (see the How To guide here), or any other alcoholic beverage, and how concentrated ethanol can be distilled from that for applications like antiseptics. If you can’t find any dried sachets of yeast for brewing or making bread I explain how you can isolate the yeast and other microorganisms you can use from the environment around you. The cells are present on the skins of grapes, or wheat grain, or even just floating on the air. One increasingly popular method for producing craft beers is spontaneous fermentation – simply allowing wild or natural yeasts and bacteria to essentially infect your starter and drive fermentation. Well, about the most wonderfully hipster effort I have ever come across is that of John Maier of Rogue Ales, who is planning to sell beer brewed using yeast harvested from his own beard. Cheers…
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