I would be interested in taking a class on working with yeast for bread, beer and wine. I’d like the class to get really technical about purifying and controlling and customizing the yeast.
Right now I’m planning on finding some juniper berries and putting them in flour and water and feeding them more flour and water twice a week. The idea is from the book Baking with Natural Yeast. (Last time I tried it, it didn’t work.)
For now…does anyone have a bread starter to share?
What is the purpose of the juniper berries?
Probably not the DMS based quick fix you are interested in, but anyhoo…
The Heritage Homestead/SustainLife folks down in Waco have great classes for all sorts of things by-hand makery related; I’ve take a couple of them, and am going back again this summer for some woodworking stuff, and then maybe in fall for some in-depth pottery stuff. Just a couple of hours drive away.
Here is link to their bread classes info: https://www.sustainlife.org/product-category/classes/kitchen-homemaking/bread-baking/
That looks very cool. I’ma take their cheese making classes.
Calling @Ian_Jaeger for his expressed interest in cultivating wild yeast, although I think his path trod more toward brewing.
Also expect Josh Melnic has some good ideas on yeast capture/farming from a scientific angle…
Juniper Berries and some types of grapes are good starting point for wild yeasts. I would like to know more about purifying. I have gotten some funky stuff where I had to restart.
I was thinking Gin…
My bathtub is currently open/free.
Yes! Still interested… but I’m headed to a southern France until August 5 to do the whole getting married thing 
Sourdough starter by chance?
Sourdough is made with a starter that contains both a yeast and a bacterium. They each feed on different sugars. I might buy a starter if anyone is interested in propagating it.
If you don’t care about sour then why use a starter at all?
If you want to get some traditional sourdough starter, send a SASE to “the Friends of Carl”. This is a group keeping alive a sourdough starter that came across the western plains to Oregon in 1847. Carl has passed away but his friends make his sourdough starter available to anyone who wants some as a way of keeping his memory alive.
Send them an envelope and they’ll send back some dried starter which you can reconstitute.
Re: “sour” dough
You can control the sourness by balancing the yeast/bacteria ratio: cool temps help the bacteria, while warmer temps and sugar help the yeast. Feed it (typically sugar, flour, and/or potato flakes/potato water depending on tradition) and leave the starter on the countertop and it’ll push the balance towards more yeast. Ignore it in the fridge and it’ll get more and more sour.
Thank you for this. What a nice remembrance.
cordials ie gin I would suspect. 
but really yeast is found on nearly all things ( think of it as midichlorians ) especially fruit. Juniper just happens to be less susceptible to some of the nasties floating around.
For a while last year I had collected a bunch of strains in my travels around the country. In particular, I found a community garden / orchard in Arizona where I took a bunch of swabs from. I later put them into a beer starter and all but one grew great. One of them also grew a green & yellow goober, but after scooping that out, adding a bit more sugared shaking it up, the yeast kept going.
I took one of them and plated it onto an agar dish and it grew some great colonies.
Sadly my travel schedule (and new fiancé) have prevented me from following through with taking a single colony and propagating it out… maybe next year.
For those of you interested, this is a GREAT site with lots of information… and we should have plates and test tubes in Science for anyone that wants to do any of this.
http://bootlegbiology.com/diy/capturing-yeast/
Forgot to bring tubes with me, but if I find something to collect some, and find a good way to get it back home, I may make some swabs from the vineyards outside my summer apartment.
I used to just have 5 plastic test tubes that I had sterilized with star-san and a couple of packs of sterilized cotton swabs. Would be sure to not touch the fuzzy end of the swab with bare hands, take a swab and then break the stick into the test tube before sealing it up… typically had no problem carrying it around for a week or so before dropping the entire swab into the jar of starter.
Let it sit for 4-5 days, then carefully fished out the swab and let it sit for another week or two.
At the end of 2 weeks you’d have a pretty good yeast cake at the bottom and as long as you were fishing out any goobers trying to grow on the surface, it wouldn’t be a problem.
