Froth Tech Newsletter #7
Tēnā koe,
Greetings to you all, Happy New Year, and welcome to 2021! We've rounded of 2020 nicely and took some time off over Christmas and New Years. Here's what's been happening lately at the lab...
In our last newsletter we celebrated ticking the final things off our list for setting up our facility. Since then we've had our heads down in full production mode, sweating our yeast brewery to it's full potential and further improving our efficiency with every batch. We now have 30 awesome brewery customers on board using our liquid yeast products in their brews, with new breweries jumping on the bandwagon each month. The feedback from breweries has been really positive, with faster fermentation, good mileage in harvesting and re-pitching across batches, improved flavour profile, and ease of ordering being crowd favourites. A massive ngā mihi, thank you to the breweries supporting our mission to bring locally made yeast to the NZ beer scene!
So we're now rounding off six months of production, we've raised 28+ batches of yeast to date, and we've sent a lot of yeast out all over Aotearoa, including... Northland, Taranaki, Napier, Auckland, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, Timaru, Oamaru, Dunedin, Wanaka, Queenstown and more! We're carrying 7 core strains of yeast, and so far (as you can probably guess) our Hazy strain 'Vape' has been the most popular, followed by our American Ale strain 'Buddy'. Since we started production in July this year, we have sold a total of:
[ 1,541,000,000,000,000 yeast cells ]
That's 1.5 Million, Billion. When it takes around 10 Trillion yeast cells to ferment 1000L of beer... it adds up quite quickly!
With this momentum, we've also been able to invest in some cool new tech to help us keep an eye on our yeast propagations more intimately than before. We recently ordered in a digital yeast cell counter from a rad startup in Germany called Oculyze. It's a 3D printed bench top device that connects to a tablet, and using a digital microscope combined with AI technology, helps us count live and dead yeast cells more rapidly and consistently.
| OCULYZE digital yeast cell counter. Made in Germany.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Watch our video tour with Still-it
Recently we had Jesse from popular distilling Youtube channel: Still It, pay us a visit to see how we do what we do. We had a great chat about all things fermentation, as well as Jesse's specialty - home distillation. The full chat can be listened to on the Still-It podcast on all leading podcast platforms, or watched with video here. The action-packed video tour of our lab and production facility can be watched here.
WILD YEAST R&D UPDATE
Our wild yeast project has been on hold for a while now, as our R&D partner Callaghan Innovation has been busy assisting with the Covid-19 response. Last Summer we went to remote locations in three different parts of NZ: Northland, Hawkes Bay and the West Coast of the South Island. We tramped deep in to the bush, away from humans, breweries and wineries, and foraged for samples of wild botanicals, in search of native NZ yeast strains. These samples went back to the lab at Callaghan and we're enriched and isolated in to single strains with yeast like appearance. We have a few hundred of these isolates in cryo storage, awaiting our next stage of R&D which is fermentation performance. We're excited that this next stage will be commencing in February, so we are one step closer on our search for wild NZ yeasts. We really don't know what we will find, if anything at all. But with the mission of unlocking the flavours of Aotearoa, and a team of highly skilled fermentation scientists at Callaghan working with us, we think it's a really exciting project and could have great potential for our fermentation industries.
We recently appeared in a short video produced by Callaghan Innovation. You can watch that here.
Thank you all for your support in 2020. Enjoy the rest of your summer, and stay tuned for more exciting frothy developments coming out of the Froth lab this year!