What About Wild Yeast in Whiskey???

Over the last few weeks I’ve talked about foundational blocks to the whiskey making process and how they impact the overall outcome of the final product. As you can tell today is about yeast.

Yeast is one of those things that gets a highlight at every major distillery you visit. Most distilleries have their own yeast strain that they’ve cared for over the years. There’s even distillers that have captured their yeast from the DNA of a dead yeast strain from a family lineage.

But what I want to focus on today isn’t just yeast, but wild yeast. Most of the sourdough that was being made in homes around the world was doing just that. We were creating an environment that would attract the yeast and then capturing it, caring for it and continuing it’s propagation indefinitely. Exactly what BOO-DEEN is doing and exactly what some distillers are doing today.

Capturing wild yeast used to be commonplace in the distilling industry but has largely gone by the wayside as the need to be able to reproduce the came thing over and over again.

If you were one of these home bakers you’ve experienced how to capture wild yeast for baking purposes, and it isn’t significantly different from capturing wild yeast for distillation.

Historic distillers were taught, usually by a family member or some other mentor, how to make a yeast mash. The sole purpose of this is to capture and make yeast so its properties were entirely different than the whiskey mash. Then it becomes a waiting game as you are forced to simply observe if you created the right environment to capture yeast. Initially they would taste and smell along the way of fermentation to see if this yeast capture was producing the things they were looking for. Once they found what they wanted they would cool it and put its in a yeast jug to keep it alive until they were ready to ferment a whiskey mash.

Given the inefficiency of this process why wouldn’t the modern distiller just buy a known yeast so they could get to the distilling process faster?

Most of them do just that. The brands for today’s episode have found unique reasons to want to buck that trend.


Topics/Brands Discussed:
Wild Yeast
Alan Bishop and The Spirits of French Lick
Todd Leopold and Leopold Bros Spirits
TX Bourbon and Firestone & Robertson Distilling

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