SirNixalot wrote:It was all beer yeast from past batches. They were all different types. An English Ale, British Ale, Belgian Wit, and Kolsch. I pictured the carboy as the Roman Colosseum, throwing in my Gladiators and seeing what happened...
What's cool about this, is that it's an awesome selective pressure/competition experiment. Goes along with stuff that Dr. Michael Lewis was saying in his talk at NHC this year, about getting the most ideal yeast for the beer you're brewing. While I'm with the guy who said earlier that you'd have them trained for fructose or at least weakened as far as maltose goes, for your ciders I'd say to go as long as you can. I mean up until they start to go south, every batch gets more and more acclimated to the cider you're doing (if you keep the recipe the same) and you've got a new "house cider yeast" better suited than really anything you'd ever buy. You could theoretically set aside some sort of master stock culture too where you make a starter with some, split it four ways or more, and then use each of those. Hard to explain without a diagram, but do some sort of tree branching kinda thing, and you'll get it to last longer for you. Hell, if it keeps on doing well you might even wanna figure out how to freeze it and bank the new strain you've kinda worked up.
Although a thing to remember about banking such a strain is that you'd want to do it as a frozen liquid culture, you wouldn't want to have some sort of plate or something like that where you could pick single colonies, you'd want to keep the blend intact.
You could do all that with beers too, even develop the yeast to specific recipes or styles. I don't know if it's just me but that sort of thing really interests me.
