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Topic: Continuous Fermentation (Read 729 times) |
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RedSoxFan
Coffinails Junior Member
Posts: 79
Tobacco - the new Tea!
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Has anyone heard of, or tried making a continuous-fermentation column using alginate-entrapped yeast? This would seem of particular benefit to beer and wine makers, for several reasons.
You can find a "lab" for this by doing a Google search for:
alginate yeast entrapment experiment lab11
I first heard of this a couple of years ago (when I was researching fuel ethanol). However, the technique, in general, has become quite popular in "molecular gastronomy" (i.e. high-tech cooking).
If there are any Top Chef fans out there, you've seen the technique (Marcel used it to make "coffee caviar" last year, and a couple of chefs used it this year).
The basic concept is pretty simple (for fermentation or for cooking, the description below is for fermentation).
a) Mix together sodium alginate, yeast, and yeast food.
b) Drop the mixture, one drop at a time, into a bath of water and Calcium Chloride (Nu-Salt, or many non-sodium ice-melt crystals)
This hardens the drops into jello-like spheres ("caviar" to the chefs).
c) there is an incubation period, where the spheres are put into aerated sugar solution, which lets the yeast multiply within the spheres.
After that, you have a lot of mature yeast, ready to ferment. You can slowly pump your grape juice or wort through the column (a tube filled with these spheres) and the yeast will ferment it as it "passes by".
This would seem to have a lot of advantages for beer or winemaking. First of all, since the yeast colony is fully formed, you don't have to "grow" the yeast in your brew. Because of that, you don't get the nasty alcohols that aerobic reproduction makes. Also, there's a lot less time for things to go bad, since the fermentation is done much more quickly. Since the columns can run for several months, you could get a lot more bang from a particular batch of yeast.
Since the yeast stays in the alginate, you shouldn't have to filter it out, nor should your wine or beer end up with a "yeasty" taste. And finally, since it ferments continuously, you can take a sip now and then to make sure everything's going OK.
(Of course, some worts may have extra stuff that clogs the alginate - most of the experiments I've seen use just sugar-water).
So, has anybody tried this, or heard of anybody using it?
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Aquila
Coffinails Administrator
Posts: 599
Grow baby, grow.
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on March 3rd, 2009, 8:50pm, RedSoxFan wrote:
The proper procedure is for you to pm me with the link, I'll check it out and tell you if you can post it or not.
As a rule of thumb if the link is to somewhere that sells tobacco seeds in competition with Coffinails.com then the answer will be no.
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Do not PM me asking questions that you could ask on the Forum. I'm in New Zealand and don't know what the best tobacco is for the rest of the world.
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