Just a piece of interesting/worthless information.

[Squatchy]

So, I for one have a small brain capacity and really don't have the where with all to fully comprehend many things. Some of these things are such as, How far away is the moon. I can add/subtract multiply to a billion. But in reality, I don't really know how big a billion is. I don't know how big a gigabyte is. I can't get my head around the speed of light. A light year? Come on. I don't know how far I can walk in a year.

This might seem really obvious but it just dawned on me in the last few days.

When we consider logarithmic growth. Such as our yeast population expansion. We all know, that yeast reproduce through budding every 12 hours. So now, take any active biomass during fermentation. We have trillions of yeast in there. But, half of any population, at any time during the process is a brand new baby. A one off yeast, that has no budding scar on it's membrane. That's really quite obvious. But I would be willing to bet most of us never knew that.

We always read. The yeast makes the final product. Right? Without a doubt. Nothing could be truer. But if we consider that every 12 hours we have a brand new life cycle that makes up half of our bio mass. That sure places the onus on us to be continuously involved in the nurture of our fermentation. Doesn't it!

So there you have it. A worthless piece of trivial information. But pretty cool, none the less!

 

[Masbustelo]

Do they reproduce like that until the very end?

 

[bernardsmith]

and interestingly - at least to me - is the fact that whereas brewers often harvest the yeast in order to reuse it (perhaps because they are more clued into the particular flavor profiles that their specific and unique yeast cultures can produce) we don't and perhaps that is because the fermentation of honey challenges the yeast more and so our yeast populations may be more different at the end than they were at the beginning and perhaps more subject to genetic modifications due to the effects of environmental selectivity...

 

[Squatchy]

and interestingly - at least to me - is the fact that whereas brewers often harvest the yeast in order to reuse it (perhaps because they are more clued into the particular flavor profiles that their specific and unique yeast cultures can produce) we don't and perhaps that is because the fermentation of honey challenges the yeast more and so our yeast populations may be more different at the end than they were at the beginning and perhaps more subject to genetic modifications due to the effects of environmental selectivity...

That is correct. As you know, beer makers consider a very high gravity 1080. I have a hunch that in time we will see some yeast strains that will come from professional meaderies that have modified their way, and will be eventually be known as "mead yeast" rather than wine yeast.

 

[Squatchy]

Do they reproduce like that until the very end?

Good question. I am not sure. I do have another useless piece of info that would include this topic better so I will go start another thread to toss that idea around.

 

[zpeckler]

Do they reproduce like that until the very end?

I don't think so. My basic microbio training was a while ago, but I think that in solution all microbes have an optimum density, and somehow they can sense when they've reached it. The yeast enter the exponential growth phase at the beginning of fermentation when the cell density is low and multiply until that optimum density of cells is reached, and then their multiplication rate falls off dramatically. If I remember correctly there's some mention of this in both "The Compleat Meadmaker" and "Yeast," but I'm at work so I can't look it up at the moment.

 

[Squatchy]

Thanks for the info. I too will try to find an answer in the "yeast book"